PRESENT-TENSE NARRATION IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION · I. Huber, Present-tense Narration in Contemporary Fiction, DOI10.1057/978-1-137-56213-5_1 CHAPTER 1 Introduction Abstract A brief

PRESENT-TENSE NARRATION IN

CONTEMPORARY FICTION

A Narratological Overview

Irmtraud Huber

Present-tense Narration in Contemporary Fiction

Irmtraud Huber

Present-tense Narration in

Contemporary Fiction A Narratological Overview

ISBN 978-1-137-56212-8 ISBN 978-1-137-56213-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-56213-5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016949257

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identifi ed as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifi cally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfi lms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifi c statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub-lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.

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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. London.

Irmtraud Huber English Department Universität Bern Berne , Switzerland

v

1 Introduction 1

2 Past and Present of Present-Tense Narration 5

3 Narrative Deictic Narration 23

4 Retrospective Narration 39

5 Interior Monologue 55

6 Simultaneous Narration 69

7 Mixed Cases 87

Conclusion 101

Appendix 111

CONTENTS

vi CONTENTS

Works Cited 113

Index 119

1© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016I. Huber, Present-tense Narration in Contemporary Fiction, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-56213-5_1

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract A brief introduction remarks on the prevalence and conten-tiousness of present tense today and points to the need to recognise the heterogeneity of present-tense usage in contemporary fi ction.

Keywords present-tense narration • Man Booker Prize • chapter overview

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

‘those of us who are still boxed in the present tense, if not in the present , will discover ways out of it, and into a future full of the possibilities of the past ’ (119).

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

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

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

Chapter 2 will draw extensively on valuable prior work by German scholars Armen Avanessian and Anke Hennig to offer a brief historical overview of the development of present-tense narration, identifying major trends and differences in its usage over time. Contemporary fi ction takes

2 I. HUBER

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up these prior usages and develops them further in very heterogeneous ways. In order to structure my subsequent observations about contem-porary literature, I identify four main types of present-tense narration and employ a narratological framework, ordering novels according to similari-ties in their narrative structure. This approach allows me to highlight the ways in which the conditions for present-tense narration change depend-ing on the narrative perspective taken in a novel (fi rst- person present-tense narration faces different challenges and can be used to different effect as third- person or authorial narration), as well as to showcase the diversity of usages and effects to be found in contemporary present-tense narration.

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

INTRODUCTION 3

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CHAPTER 2

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

Keywords present-tense narration • historical development • narrative situation

When Ian Watt wrote his highly infl uential study The Rise of the Novel , he chose to discuss three major early novelists who stand for three different solutions to the challenge of novelistic narration. Daniel Defoe favours the fi rst- person autobiographical voice in which a protagonist looks back on his or her life. Henry Fielding develops an overt authorial narrator who does not hide his control over the story. Lastly, Samuel Richardson excels in what Gérard Genette calls ‘interpolated’ narration (217). Richardson chose the epistolary form, with its temporal proximity of event and nar-ration, as a way of writing ‘to the Moment , while the Heart is agitated by

Past and Present of Present-tense Narration

Hopes and Fears, on Events undecided’ ( Grandison 4; original emphasis), and thus keeping the interest of his readers engaged by the illusion that they are witnessing the story as it unfolds. Nevertheless, and even though Richardson lets Lovelace commend his own ‘lively present-tense manner’ of narration in Clarissa (882), all of these three different approaches to novelistic narration predominantly employ the past tense .

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

6 I. HUBER

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

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

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

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

PAST AND PRESENT OF PRESENT-TENSE NARRATION 7

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

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

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

As one can see from both this example and the passage from Tristram Shandy, Gentleman quoted above, the deictic use of present tense marks a pause in the course of narrative events, a metafi ctional moment in which the reader is reminded of the moment of reading, or in which the narrator muses about the writing process and/or the reception of his or her work. Thus, strictly speaking, it is wrong to speak of such instances as present- tense narration, since nothing is narrated; rather the narrative is precisely halted here. Christian Paul Casparis therefore calls such instances of the present tense ‘non- narrative ’ and excludes them from his discussion of the historical present tense (128–9), and Harald Weinrich assigns the present tense in fi ction to the level of discourse , or the discussed world ( bespro-chene Welt ), and the past tense to the level of the narrative, or the narrated world ( erzählte Welt ) (29–32; 41–72).

The above example from Vanity Fair also already hints at another vari-ant of present-tense usage, which would fall under Fludernik ’s second cat-egory of intermittent usage . If the narrator ‘can see Jones’ we are likely to infer that he is conjuring him up before his mind’s eye rather than

8 I. HUBER

claiming to actually see him. Armen Avanessian and Anke Hennig suggest that another aspect of present-tense usage in classical literature can be found in the narration of dreams , daydreams and visions. Avanessian and Hennig spend a whole chapter of their study on the present tense in nar-ration on a detailed discussion of such usages of the present tense, draw-ing attention to their close connection to the imaginary ( Present Tense 148–178; see also Casparis 101–3). While the present tense is not exactly non- narrative in such cases, it marks an explicit inactuality within the fi c-tional world as opposed to the presumed actuality of the narrated events. However, one can easily perceive that such demarcations already become slippery in this context. After all, whether Jones is ‘really’ there in the above passage is an entirely moot question. Since the whole story unfolds in the discourse of the narrator, the boundary between his imaginations and his alleged perceptions is necessarily slippery.

Apart from dreams and visions, Fludernik ’s category of intermittent usage mainly accommodates the so-called historical present . The historical present uses the present tense to narrate past events. A common rhetorical device, the historical present is classically used within a largely past-tense context to render a scene more vivid and heighten its affective impact, even while it remains unambiguously clear that it continues to refer to past events. 2 Charles Dickens was particularly fond of this device and the ‘Retrospect’ chapters of David Copperfi eld are frequently cited as prime examples. 3 They also serve as still more examples of the close connection of such present-tense usage to the imaginary , the realm of dreams and visions:

I must pause yet once again. O, my child-wife, there is a fi gure in the mov-ing crowd before my memory , quiet and still, saying in its innocent love and childish beauty, Stop to think of me—turn to look upon the Little Blossom, as it fl utters to the ground! I do. All else grows dim, and fades away. I am again with Dora, in our cottage. I do not know how long she has been ill. I am so used to it in feeling, that I cannot count the time. (769)

Dora is evoked here in a vision of the past , which is carefully introduced in order to maintain the temporal distance between narrating I and experi-encing I , even though that distance is no longer marked by tense. Written entirely in the present tense, the context of these chapters and their titles situate their contents fi rmly and unmistakably in the narrator’s past . The past steps out of the fl ow of time, becomes timeless itself in the perpetual


present of the moment of waiting into which the narrator fi nds himself once more transported. Dorrit Cohn has argued that such an effect of the historical present cannot be understood as an inherent quality of present- tense narration but depends precisely on the shift from past to present tense:

The highlighting impact generally attributed to the use of the historical pres-ent —variously expressed in terms of enhanced vividness , dramatic effect, or presentifi cation —is accordingly understood as being wholly dependent on its intermittence : if it were not embedded in normal tensual surroundings, its tensual deviance would not stand out. (99)

Such a historical present thus generates its effect because it is set off from the norm. It refers to the past ‘as if ’ it were present but highlights the fact of this rhetorical illusion.

It is also worth noting that tense alteration and the use of the histori-cal present is quite usual in oral narration. Thus, the use of the histori-cal present in narration can also serve to evoke oral traditions. Suzanne Fleischman explores these intersections in much detail but continues to argue that the underlying motivation of the use of the present tense lies in its ‘METALINGUISTIC function […] to identify the discourse as some-thing other than narrative’ (308; original capitals).

Those deictic and intermittent usages of the present tense which can be found most frequently in classical literature thus can be attributed the following features: (1) The present tense is non- narrative , occurring when the course of the narrated events is suspended, commonly by authorial comment or direct reader address . (2) It is closely connected to the imagi-nary , to the immediate visualisations of other, highly subjective mental states, like visions or dreams . (3) It is marked as an exception, a deviation from the norm of past-tense narration .

Considering these attributes, the forms present-tense narration takes in modernist and postmodernist literature—which resist their classical heritage—are perhaps not surprising. In late modernist literature, present- tense narration increasingly breaks out of the confi nes of deictic and inter-mittent usage and merits the introduction of the third and last category of present-tense usage which Fludernik mentions: ‘(c) the consistent use of the present tense (either in the entire text, or in long passages of text)’ (‘Chronology’ 124). Its appeal for late- modernist authors presumably lay partly in the very fact of its marginality in classical narration. Extended

10 I. HUBER

present-tense usage was unusual and thus had the potential to create the defamiliarising and alienating effect modernist authors were often trying to achieve. But the present tense also catered to other interests of the (post)modernists. As Gérard Genette observes, the elimination of the temporal distance between story and narration tends to strongly privilege one of the two (218). Either the narrative instance is effaced in a bare report of events, or plot becomes secondary in the full exploration of the narrative voice. Thus, present-tense narration offered itself intriguingly as an apt device to develop two diametrically opposed modernist tenden-cies: an interest in the subjective workings of the individual mind on the one hand and extreme objectivity and a refusal of plot on the other. In other words, present-tense usage in modernist literature tends towards two directions: the subjective present of the stream of consciousness and the factographies of the nouveau roman .

Modernist literature fi rst turned to the present tense with the explora-tion of the stream of consciousness . The extreme interiority and subjectiv-ity of that technique, tracing thoughts and associations as they arise in an individual mind, clearly favours the present tense. The present tense offers itself in this case because of its long association with other states of con-sciousness like dreams and visions, but also because of its apparent imme-diacy of report , as a mere notation of whatever thought crosses a mind, without putting it into any order or under any sort of obvious narrative control. It is well suited to render the non-chronological sequences of association and the timelessness of the mind, in which the future is evoked in visions, and memories recall the past into the present moment (the passage from David Copperfi eld quoted above illustrates well this latter potential of the present tense, which modernist streams of consciousness would later take up).

Nevertheless, and in spite of the modernist s’ fascination with the pres-ent moment, high- modernist texts often remain for the most part faithful to the past tense . Even as innovative a work as James Joyce’s Ulysses frames its narrative in the past tense , reserving the present tense for its extensive stream of consciousness passages. Virginia Woolf, for her part, approaches a consistent use of present tense in The Waves , which consists largely of a direct representation of her protagonists’ thoughts. Nevertheless, the minimal interventions of the narrator (restricted for the most part to an identifi cation of the respective speaker and to the chapter interludes) are kept in the past tense . Thus, while most of the novel is, in effect, writ-ten in the present tense, its narrative premise remains a retrospective one,


governed by the past tense . In a further confi rmation of the non- narrative bias associated with the present tense, Virginia Woolf herself doubted that The Waves could be called a novel (Parsons v–vi), since its strictly narrative parts (those in past tense ) are minimal.

The present tense only escapes from such subordination to a past-tense frame in late modernism, and on the verge of postmodernism . At this stage, the second tendency of modernist present-tense usage, that towards objectivity , comes more strongly to the fore. It harnesses the alleged anti- fi ctionality of the present tense, its association with the level of discourse as opposed to the level of plot . The present tense allows for a kind of lit-erature that reduces plot to a minimum and restricts itself to a recording of the present moment in a refusal of the teleological structure and chrono-logical order of classical past-tense narration . While there are few cases in British literature of a radical realisation of this approach, Fleischman dis-cusses some vivid examples from among the factographies of the nouveau roman (295–309). In these literary experiments which reject traditional narrative plot development and purport to be mere recordings of facts, narrative events, to the extent that they do occur at all, are ‘commented on and exclaimed upon, but not narrated’ ( Fleischman 301). The narrative voice is largely effaced and the narrator’s control of the narrative is usually denied or hidden. According to Fleischman , such texts privilege descrip-tion over narration and can be called a literature of visual perception, since they restrict their report of the present moment to what is externally per-ceivable (302). Casparis calls this a ‘ camera -eye’ present tense, making the affi nity of this technique to visual media even more explicit (49–62).

In addition, the present tense also offered itself for some of the extended metafi ctional experiments of postmodernism . Since the present tense was associated with the level of discourse , it became an obvious choice for texts which aimed to foreground the mechanisms and moments of nar-ration and reception. Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller is a striking example. It famously situates its story in the very moment of reading, beginning with a direct reader address in a present-tense impera-tive: ‘You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveller . Relax. Concentrate.’ While Calvino’s second- person narrative focuses on the moment of reception, John Barth’s short story ‘Autobiography: A Self-Recorded Fiction’ emphasises the coincid-ing of reception and production. This story is pure discourse without plot , it records its own recording and has no reference beyond itself: ‘I see myself as a halt narrative: fi rst person, tiresome. Pronoun sans ante

12 I. HUBER

or precedent, warrant or respite. Surrogate for the substantive; content-less form, interestless principle; blind eye blinking at nothing’ (35–6). Both these cases emphasise the non- narrative dimension of the present tense, its alleged predilection to state (or produce) facts , not to spin fi c-tions (although Calvino’s novel quickly departs from that initial premise, turning his reader into a fully fl eshed character with a story of his own). Expanding on Fludernik ’s categories, one could perhaps speak here of a consistent deictic usage .

Even in their difference, the tendency towards subjectivity and that towards objectivity share some basic premises. As Fleischman points out, both these tendencies point away from narrative proper and towards one of the other macro-genres: drama and poetry (308). They attempt to fi nd alternatives to classical plot narration and turn to the present tense for its pretence of ceding narrative control. Thus, they confi rm the classical conception of the present tense as a non- narrative and non- fi ctional mode. They choose the present tense precisely because it seems to resist classi-cal plot narration (see Avanessian and Hennig , ‘Evolution des Präsens’ 146–51). Moreover, they share a concern with the unfolding of the pres-ent moment. While Avanessian and Hennig rightly point out that ‘the present tense is only rarely used in novels for an emphasis on the immedi-ate present ’, and caution that ‘the temporal effect of the literary present tense can never be reduced to a modern pathos of the present moment’ (‘Einleitung’ 18; my translation), 4 modernist usage of the present tense does distance itself from the explicit reference to the past of the historical present .

Commencing in the second half of the twentieth century, however, an increasing emancipation of present-tense narration from this appar-ent double bias can be noted. In present-tense novels like John Updike’s Rabbit, Run (1960), Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), or J.M. Coetzee ’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), the present tense is explored as a tense of narration proper, not only as one of commentary or report . While the earlier extension of present-tense usage in modernism and postmodernism might have paved the way for this development, it is only at this point that present-tense narration begins to free itself from its association with the non- narrative and non- fi ctional .

This change is predicated on two basic adjustments in the attitude towards literary tense usage: The fi rst is the acknowledgement that liter-ary tense usage does not necessarily bear any connection to the narrated time. As Fludernik puts it: ‘No natural relationship between the choice of


grammatical tense in narratives and underlying temporal relations obtains. On the contrary, the deployment of tense options in narrative texts is a fairly complex matter which depends not merely on real-life precedent but also on literary peculiarities and generic expectations’ (‘Chronology’ 121). After all, not all past-tense narration actually refers to past events. Most obviously, works of science fi ction and temporal utopia are usually narrated in the past tense , thus shifting the position of the narrator even further into the future (see Genette 219). Indeed, Käte Hamburger ’s work on narrative tenses is often mentioned in this context as an important touchstone, since she argues that the literary past tense serves in fact to make the narrated events present to the reader in a process of presentifi ca-tion ( Vergegenwärtigung ). While the past tense ostensibly serves to mark a distance between the narrated events and the act of narration, in fact this distance disappears in the unfolding of the plot and has to be reactivated by direct reader addresses or references to the situation of narration (and a switch to the present tense ) in order to be perceived ( Hamburger 59–72). Thus, as Avanessian and Hennig explain:

In the reader’s psyche, the fabula is equi-present with the sujet , because it is the sujet that generates the fabula in the fi rst place. Only when we assume a third level of external reference does the fabula precede the sujet ( ex post ). […] The impossibility, from the point of view of narration, of synchronously experiencing and narrating does not apply in the reader’s consciousness. Here, the narration of the story and the experience of the story build up syn-chronously. The fi ctive event is always synchronous with the idea (reception) of a fi ctive event, because otherwise it does not exist at all. ( Present Tense 87)

Once the perspective is shifted from the fi ctive situation of narration—which derives its preference for past-tense narration from a mimetic com-mitment to real-life communicative situations—to the perspective of the reader, for which the narrated events share the same present as the moment of narration (the present moment of the reading experience), past-tense narration is exposed as a specifi c literary convention, which no longer appears to be the only commonsensically viable narrative option.

The second realisation which abetted an extension of present-tense usage is directly related to the fi rst. If the past tense has long seemed to be the prime signpost of fi ctionality , as the narrated events are projected into a more or less clearly defi ned past (as in the traditional opening of fairy tales ‘Once upon a time there was …’), it now appears that the present tense (which, as I have mentioned above, was usually associated with factuality )

14 I. HUBER

in fact may serve as an even stronger marker of fi ctionality once it is used for narration. After all, precisely because a real-world communicative situ-ation in which events could be experienced and narrated at the same time is diffi cult to imagine, the fi ctionality of a present-tense narration is imme-diately striking. As Fludernik proposes, ‘[t]he narrative present, as a clearly irregular use of the present tense for narrative events that do not occur in the deictic here-and-now, in these terms provides a metaphor for fi ctional distancing’ (‘Chronology’ 123).

Avanessian and Hennig therefore speak in this context of an ‘inten-sifi cation of fi ction’ (‘Altermoderne Roman’ 246; my translation). They argue that the narrative usage of the present tense marks a change from a literary tradition which privileges the standpoint of narration, to a litera-ture which favours the perspective of fi ction ( Present Tense 75). Indeed, the exploration of the possibilities of the present tense as a tense of narra-tion is predicated on an emancipation from the mimetic paradigm, which has long governed Western literature. Focusing specifi cally on fi rst- person simultaneous narration, that is present-tense narration in which narration and narrative coincide temporally, Dorrit Cohn notes that

[i]ts innovation, to state it bluntly, is to emancipate fi rst- person fi ctional narration from the dictates of formal mimetics, granting it the same degree (though not the same kind) of discursive freedom that we take for granted in third- person fi ction: the license to tell a story in an idiom that corre-sponds to no manner of real-world, natural discourse . (104–5)

Such forms of present-tense narration explore ‘impossible’ narrative situations, which have freed themselves from the ‘commonsensical view that narratives are all naturally written in the past tense or preterite form because the events they relate to are all anterior to the telling of them’ (Fludernik, ‘Chronology’ 121).

While Cohn focuses on fi rst- person simultaneous narration, Avanessian and Hennig are interested in a rising number of novels from the second half of the twentieth century which explore the present tense as a way to narrate past events , extending the typically intermittent historical pres-ent over a whole text. Different suggestions have been made as to the effect of such a narrative technique: Avanessian and Hennig argue that it serves to create an asynchronous present which foregrounds fi ctionality , as the past is actualised as a series of moments which are all simultaneously present ( Present Tense 4). This, so they claim, is the only way to narrate the specifi c experience of history which is characteristic for the twentieth


century: ‘history is out of joint’ ( Present Tense 65). Opting for the present tense, even the historical novel ostensibly abjures the control and critical distance which a retrospective perspective offers. Kazunari Miyahara there-fore suggests that the use of the present tense is one of the ways in which postcolonial writers in particular attempt to develop ‘a counter-voice that felt less domineeringly monological—which would enable them to boldly write “histories from below”’ (246). The present tense, which remains a marked, ‘ unnatural’ tense in this context, becomes a means of ‘contra- imperialism, or a voice of a kind of resistance writing’ (Miyahara 255). Casparis , fi nally, argues that a consistent use of the present tense is only appropriate to what he calls ‘ non- sequitur novels’ which typically ‘present […] a sequence of action before recognition of consequence and causal-ity’ (67–9, original italics). One of the aims of this book will be to show that while there is truth in all these claims, each in itself does not suffi ce to account for the wide variety of the contemporary present-tense novel.

To summarise (while necessarily greatly simplifying) the historical devel-opment and the different tendencies of present-tense narration, let me offer Table 2.1 as a rough overview. Of course, boundaries between the different rows, especially between modernist and postmodernist usages, must be understood to be permeable, and previous forms always continue to be used in later periods.

Table 2.1 illustrates how the larger historical tendencies lead from a fairly restricted use of the present tense to ever more extended usages, which increasingly emancipate themselves from mimetic dictates concerning the narrative situation. While initially considered to be in essence non- narrative and non- fi ctional , the present tense is increasingly explored as a

Table 2.1 The historical development and different tendencies of present-tense narration

Period Category ( Fludernik ) Type

Classical Realism Deictic Intermittent

Narrator commentary Historical present

Modernism Intermittent Consistent

Interior monologue Current report

Postmodernism Consistent

Consistent deictic

Factography Present-tense novel (subversion of conventions/authority of historical narrative) Extended self-referentiality (metafi ction)

16 I. HUBER

tense for narration proper. However, throughout the twentieth century, this exploration generally continued to feature as a conscious attempt at defamiliarisation and experimentation , a deviation from the norm of past- tense narration, and thus remained, in essence, subordinate to the latter (see also Avanessian and Hennig , Present Tense 213–14).

If the above roughly sketches the historical development and variations of present-tense narration, what can be said about its manifestations in contemporary fi ction? Let me preface this discussion with three general observations about the conditions of contemporary present-tense nar-ration. First, it has to be noted that present-tense narration has become so common and unremarkable that it cannot fi nd its justifi cation in a gesture of deviation and experiment any longer. Nowadays, a novel will scarcely strike its readers as innovative for being written in present tense. Indeed, if I may judge from my own experience, the present tense has become so familiar as a tense of narration that readers quickly get used to it after the fi rst few pages or might even fail to consciously notice it altogether. Monika Fludernik therefore speaks of the ‘paradoxical situ-ation that the narrative present is both a rather unknown oddity and a technique of unremarked- upon familiarity’ ( Natural Narratology 256). Second, the present tense has today come to fulfi l all the functions of past-tense narrations. It is no longer restricted to the level of discourse , used to discuss and comment but not to narrate a world, as Weinrich still could justly claim in the 1960s. Nor is it beholden to a mimetic situation of narration. As we will see in the following chapters, much contem-porary present-tense narration simply pays no heed to the plausibility of its narrative situation or even, in some cases, fl aunts its very impos-sibility. The third observation follows directly from the previous two: contemporary present-tense narration is highly heterogeneous. Various historical variants are picked up on and expanded in one way or another, while the present tense also increasingly intrudes on territory that used to be dominated by the past tense . As the most pluri-signifi cant of all tenses the present tense can be used to evoke the future and the past as well as the present , the real and the surreal, the singular or the iterative and durative, the visual and perceptual as well as the process of thought. ‘Used as a fi ctional tense,’ Dorrit Cohn suggests, ‘the present can poten-tially bring into play all these meanings and more, fusing and confusing, consuming and subsuming them to create a grammatically homologous fi eld of unparalleled semantic tension, instability, fl exibility, and ambigu-ity’ (107). My following discussion will serve to show that contemporary


authors are beginning to exploit this potential. The decision on whether to write a novel in present or past tense has nowadays become a real choice, since both are almost equally widely accepted and each offers its own advantages and disadvantages.

Albeit heterogeneous, four main types of present-tense narration can be identifi ed in contemporary fi ction based on the historical development which I have just traced. All of these types follow from and expand upon aspects which have been explored before. A common structure in contem-porary present-tense usage could be described as narrative deictic . The present tense is used to lay out the situation of narration, quite like in tra-ditional, particularly fi rst- person narratives, in which the main story is told in the past tense with a few present-tense insertions which serve mainly as a frame and a commentary but are generally non- narrative in that they do not advance the plot . In contemporary novels, however, these present- tense insertions tend to be no longer marginal but to develop their own plotlines. They are not restricted to non-narrative commentary and brief references to the narrative situation but are truly narrative in their own right. Another frequent usage of the present tense in contemporary fi c-tion is closely related to the historical present . It is retrospective in that the present tense is used to portray past events , whose pastness is fi rmly established by context and historical markers. As such it departs little from a traditional historical present and poses few diffi culties for a mimetically plausible narrative situation . What is striking in contemporary literature, however, is that in such cases the present tense is used as the main narra-tive tense, with few tense switches . It no longer serves as an exceptional rhetorical marker but becomes the dominant narrative tense. Signifi cantly less frequent are such texts that use the present tense in the form of an interior monologue , exclusively focalised through one or various char-acters. Such texts present a kind of extended stream of consciousness , a notation of a character’s thoughts, but more often than not they refrain from attempting a reproduction of the inconsistencies and unordered free associations which characterise much modernist use of this mode. Finally, a fair number of contemporary novels develop scenarios of simultaneous narration , in which the present tense is used to narrate events which are co-instantaneous with the moment of narration. In this case the mimetic implausibility of the narrative situation is most striking. However, in spite of the suspicion that the appeal of the present tense must be closely con-nected to the speed and compulsory up-to-dateness of contemporary

18 I. HUBER

society, simultaneous narration serves many different aesthetic aims and is only one among the different forms of contemporary present-tense usage.

It is striking that, among the aspects of present-tense usage, the ones which are explored most frequently in contemporary fi ction are those that employ the present tense as a tense of narration. In contrast, the non- narrative and non- fi ctional aspects of the tense seem to exert less appeal at the present moment. Thus, few instances of contemporary pres-ent-tense usage foreground its association with objectivity and documen-tation or develop its deictic usage in extended metafi ctional commentary.

In order to provide some sort of ordered overview of such a highly het-erogeneous body of texts and to suggest certain recurring characteristics of contemporary present-tense narration, a narratological approach offers a useful framework. The effects and conditions of present-tense narration depend largely on the narrative situation in which it is used. There is a signifi cant difference between a third- person narration and a fi rst- person narration written in the present tense. First-person present-tense narration faces the problem that simultaneous narration seems to be strictly speaking impossible and threatens to forfeit the potential and narrative complexi-ties of temporal depth and multiple temporal levels. 5 The latter also holds true for third- person present-tense narration in which the position of the narrator becomes equally impossible and is therefore either obfuscated or explicitly fl aunted in its impossibility. Furthermore, the present tense puts some bounds on narrative omniscience , since the future may seem in such cases to be beyond the narrator’s knowledge. Consequently, an analysis and comparison of present-tense narrations needs to take their respective narrative situations into consideration.

I will therefore structure my discussion of the different types of present- tense narration roughly according to Franz Stanzel ’s three cate-gories of narrative situations: authorial , fi gural and fi rst- person narration. According to Stanzel, in fi rst-person narration, ‘the mediacy of the nar-ration belongs totally to the fi ctional realm of the characters of the novel: the mediator, that is, the fi rst-person narrator, is a character of this world just as the other characters are’. In the fi gural narrative situation, this fi rst-person narrator is replaced by what Stanzel calls a refl ector: ‘a character in the novel who thinks, feels and perceives, but does not speak to the reader like a narrator. The reader looks at the other characters of the nar-rative through the eyes of this refl ector- character. Since nobody ‘narrates’ in this case, the presentation seems to be direct’. The authorial narrative


situation, in contrast, features a narrator who ‘is outside the world of the characters. The narrator’s world exists on a different level of being from that of the characters’ (Stanzel, Theory 4–5). I fully acknowledge that Stanzel ’s system has its limitations and has been criticised and much refi ned by narratologists since. Even though Genette, for one, would offer a much more nuanced descriptive terminology, for the purposes of this book the stronger generalisation of Stanzel ’s system in fact proves advantageous. Grouping my material along the lines of Stanzel ’s catego-ries allows me to explore differences within larger groups of similarities and to show the breadth of possibilities of present-tense narration, even among texts which share some basic narratological features.

While I restrict my discussion largely to novels which use the present tense consistently or at least over substantial stretches of the narrative, there are, of course, many contemporary novels which mix narrative per-spectives in various ways. I will consider some such texts, whose usage of different types of present tense in different kinds of narrative situations seems to merit separate discussion, in a chapter of their own.

As a fi nal comment, I admit that it is possible that the picture I offer in this book is somewhat falsifi ed by the pre-selection of the literary mar-ketplace. However that may be, these observations certainly hold true for the novels that currently shape the literary landscape of Britain. Thus, an overview of the various ways in which the present tense is used in contemporary fi ction such as this book offers, serves to interrogate and extend Avanessian and Hennig ’s claim about a turn from narration to fi ction. ‘Such texts,’ they claim, ‘do not declare narration as the founda-tion of their being, and do not endeavour to establish it as the plausible basis of their genesis, but base the essence of their existence in fi ction’ (‘Altermoderne Roman’ 255; my translation). 6 The contemporary present-tense novel is indeed no longer concerned with a mimetic justifi -cation of its narrative situation, but highlights its own status as fi ction, as a self-justifying discourse which no longer seeks to imitate non-fi ctional forms of communication. As I have mentioned before, Avanessian and Hennig restrict their observations to historical novels using the present tense, the majority of which have commonly been classifi ed as postmod-ernist (though Avanessian and Hennig prefer the designation ‘alter-modern’). The following discussion will interrogate the applicability of their suggestion to a much wider variety of contemporary examples of present-tense narration, showing both the continuing relevance and the limitations of their observations.

20 I. HUBER

NOTES 1. The importance of historiography for the development of the early novel has

been frequently emphasised (see Saeger 126–131). 2. While almost ubiquitous, the vividness explanation has also been found to

be too imprecise. Casparis insists that, instead of being adequately explained by vividness, the present tense, ‘being an atemporal device, functions as a conscious or unconscious signal, for instance, of the narrator’s mood, or his subjective attitude towards the experience he is relating imaginatively or as an eyewitness’ (23; original emphasis). Suzanne Fleischman ’s suggestion to understand tense usage in terms of marked and unmarked tenses offers a much more nuanced view of the possibilities of present-tense usage (56–63; see also 75–8).

3. Dickens was indeed exceptional in experimenting with a more extended use of present tense that goes beyond the typical historical present tense, famously so in Bleak House , which combines a fi rst-person retrospective past-tense narrative with an omniscient authorial narrative perspective that uses the present tense throughout. Intriguingly, the effect in this case is not a higher proximity of the present-tense passages but a more depersonalised and typifi ed commentary on society as opposed to the highly subjective impressions given by Esther’s fi rst-person account. The present tense thus continues to be associated with objectivity, even while it is already employed as a proper narrative tense.

4. ‘Erst im literaturgeschichtlichen Zusammenhang gelangen wir aber zu der anfangs überraschenden Einsicht, dass das Präsens nur in wenigen Romanen eine unmittelbare Jetztemphase ausdrückt. Besonders in ihrer Aufeinanderfolge zeigen die einzelnen close readings , dass der literarische Zeitausdruck des Präsens niemals auf ein modernes Pathos des Augenblicks zu reduzieren ist.’

5. Avanessian and Hennig discuss some German modernist literary examples of texts which attempt to create plausible narrative scenarios for simultane-ous narration (‘Evolution des Präsens’ 156–8). Such experiments go beyond the traditional recourse to the epistolary novel or the diary novel, which approximate simultaneous narration by using intermittent, short-term ret-rospection. As Avanessian and Hennig ’s examples amply demonstrate, a mimetically believable scenario of simultaneous narration is diffi cult to maintain and often seems somewhat awkward .

6. ‘Diese Texte deklarieren nicht das Erzählen als den Grund ihres Daseins und plausibilisieren es nicht als Basis ihrer Genese, sondern machen die Fiktion zum Grund ihrer Existenz.’



CHAPTER 3

Abstract This chapter discusses novels with a multilevelled narrative structure, in which the present tense is used in a frame tale for an embed-ded retrospective past-tense narrative. While a deictic use of the present tense, in form of narrator’s commentary or reference to the moment of narration, has a long tradition, this chapter illustrates that in contemporary literature this deictic usage is extended to the point at which it develops its own narrative strand, often of similar or equal weight as the past-tense nar-rative it frames. The traditionally non-narrative deictic usage of the present tense thus becomes narrative itself. Among the examples discussed in this chapter are Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary , Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy.

Keywords present-tense narration • narrative frame • narrative embedding

I begin my discussion with the often least conspicuous and most tradi-tional usage of extended passages of present-tense narration in contempo-rary fi ction. This would fall into Fludernik ’s category of a deictic usage of the present tense. The present tense is used to refer to the situation of nar-ration in a narrative construction in which this present tense of enuncia-tion alternates with or frames a central (usually past-tense) narrative . It is deictic in the sense that it refers to the narrator’s or reader’s here-and-now.

Narrative Deictic Narration

Among the current usages of the narrative present-tense this one is usu-ally most easily recuperable within conventional mimetic frames of read-ing. The justifi cation for the usage of the present-tense lies precisely in the temporal difference between the act of narration and the narrated events. Whereas the precise position from which the story is narrated often becomes a problematic issue in other forms of present-tense narration, in deictic usage the narrative situation is directly addressed and justifi ed. At the same time, the main burden of narrative development generally does not rest on the present-tense passages, but often evolves in past-tense remi-niscences . In such a constellation, the deictic distance between the moment of narration and the narrated events is made explicit and generally gains central importance as the narrator or refl ector looks back on his or her past and comments on the narrative events in hindsight. Any understanding and representation of the evolving events is already infl uenced by the narrator’s knowledge of their outcome. Instead of blurring the difference between discourse and story, which is often the effect of other forms of present-tense narration, narrative deictic usage emphasises this difference and charges it with meaning. What is conspicuous in contemporary examples, however, is that they go beyond brief references to the act of enunciation and vague hints at the situation in which the narration takes place, to fl esh out vivid scenarios often with plotlines of their own. The traditionally non- narrative deictic references thus become narrative in their own right.

FIRST-PERSON NARRATIVE A number of recent novels remain fairly conventionally deictic in their use of the present-tense, by situating their past-tense narrative in specifi c com-municative settings. The narrative voice is in such cases either imagined as part of a conversation in which the interlocutor remains muted, as in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), or as a one-sided written exchange, as in Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger (2008). In neither of these two cases does the deictic present-tense ever become truly narrative but rather remains primarily performative and descriptive . Nonetheless, in The Reluctant Fundamentalist at least, some basic narrative events do take place in the deictic present: different dinner courses arrive and the narrator accompanies his American dinner guest back to his hotel, at which point the novel ends, suggesting that an act of violence might be about to occur. The present-tense in this case takes the form of a running commentary, or current report . Precisely the fact that the novel ends where it ends indicates

24 I. HUBER

that violence might ensue, since that would prevent the narrator from con-tinuing his ‘chatter’ (183). While there are narrative elements in the deictic present-tense , the novel never departs from its mimetically justifi ed deictic frame but breaks off when narrative proper would have to take over .

While lacking the conversational setting of the two previous examples, present-tense usage in The Testament of Mary (2012), Colm Tóibín’s rewriting of the life of Jesus from the perspective of his mother, is a good example for the way in which a deictic present-tense retains a mimetically imaginable situation of narration , even while it goes beyond mere deictic commentary. Mary uses the present-tense exclusively in an iterative or descriptive sense, outlining her present situation, while specifi c narrative events are always rendered in past tense . There is no one to hear her story, but she makes the moment and the reason for her act of narration explicit: ‘I do not know why it matters that I should tell the truth to myself at night, why it should matter that the truth should be spoken at least once in the world’ (86).

Even though Mary is old and at the end of her life, however, the present moment of enunciation is not exclusively one of hindsight, the end-point of a development. Rather, it is a point of transition in which the truth of the past threatens to be lost in a future illusion. Mary’s act of narration is an ultimately futile attempt to set her truth against the version of the story that is already replacing it even in her own mind, to defend the past from the distortions of the future :

It will not be long maybe when I begin again to dream that I waited on the hill that day and held him naked in my arms, it will not be long before that dream, so close to me now and so real, will fi ll the air and will make its way backwards into time and thus become what happened, or what must have happened, what happened, what I know happened, what I saw happened. (87)

Both the past and the future are here presented as vulnerable and malleable. Even memory itself threatens to become unreliable . Only the present seems to offer a precarious and transient possibility for truth.

The moment of narration thus itself becomes a pivotal point in the narrative development, as the tragedy of Mary’s situation emerges in her inability to defend the truth of her memories and ultimately her and her son’s humanity against religious mystifi cation. The deictic present-tense offers an important counterweight to the past-tense narrative of Mary’s memories of her son’s life. To the extent to which the narrative focuses on

NARRATIVE DEICTIC NARRATION 25

Mary’s present situation the story becomes truly Mary’s own and not just a version of the life of Jesus told from her perspective.

Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (2013) offers a somewhat more complicated case, which begins to depart form a mimetically plausible narrative situation . This novel combines two main narrative voices: In a diary, the Japanese teenage girl Nao relates her diffi cult time in Japan, being mobbed and tortured by her class-mates and watching her depres-sive father contemplating suicide. This diary is later found by Ruth as fl ot-sam on the beach of the remote island in British Columbia which is home to her and her husband Oliver. Nao’s fi rst-person narration is combined with a fi gural account of Ruth’s endeavour to decipher and to understand Nao’s narrative. While Ruth’s part employs the past tense , Nao makes extensive use of a deictic present-tense, evoking a multiple present of writ-ing and reading:

As for me, right now I am sitting in a French maid café in Akiba Electricity Town, listening to a sad chanson that is playing sometime in your past, which is also my present, writing this and wondering about you, somewhere in my future. And if you’re reading this, then maybe by now you’re wonder-ing about me, too. (3)

Truly deictic, pointing out the time and location of the act of writing, Nao’s part of the novel also goes to some pains to maintain a mimetically conceivable narrative situation, avoiding the paradoxes of simultaneous nar-ration . Thus Nao, for example, occasionally interrupts her narrative in order to write and receive text messages. At the same time, the present-tense in passages as the one above merges the present moment of narration with the present moment of the act of reading in its direct reader addresses , even though the temporal distance between these two processes is acknowledged.

The deictic centre of the narrative becomes even more ambivalent once Ruth starts reading the diary. Whereas Nao’s fi rst chapters precede Ruth’s act of reading, once Ruth’s narrative has come to the point when she starts reading, the reader progresses through Nao’s narrative at the same pace as Ruth does. The deictic present-tense thereby gains an additional level of reference. It not only evokes Nao’s and the reader’s present, but also Ruth’s act of reading in the past-tense narrative. By being embedded in Ruth’s past-tense narrative, Nao’s deictic present turns into a narrative moment itself, as Ruth wonders about what has happened to Nao. Nao’s own present, which she marks by her deictic usage of the present-tense,

26 I. HUBER

is therefore temporally twice removed from the present of the reader. At the same time, her use of the present-tense and her frequent direct reader addresses make her narrative more immediate , more present , than Ruth’s fi gural past-tense narration .

These multiple layers of deictic present make an otherwise rather tradi-tional and unremarkable use of the present-tense intriguing, in particular because the plot emphasises the confusion of these temporal layers in the act of reading. For the reader, Avanessian and Hennig assert, the fabula and the sujet are contemporaneous, because they unfold simultaneously (see present-tense 87). Ozeki’s novel plays with this dissolution of tempo-ral boundaries by simultaneously erecting a temporal distance between Nao’s and Ruth’s present (and the present of the reader) and radically undermining this distance. It does so by reminding the reader of the arti-fi cial construction of such a temporal distance and of the fact that both narrative strands are fi ctions and as such develop simultaneously.

Formally, this is suggested by the fact that both narrative parts feature footnotes. Initially, these seem to be restricted to Nao’s narrative and can be read as Ruth’s endeavours to make sense of Nao’s story. They there-fore serve to strengthen the temporal distance and metatextual hierar-chy between the plot-strands. Later on, however, footnotes also appear in Ruth’s own narrative. The footnotes thus constitute a third narrative perspective, commenting equally on both Nao’s and Ruth’s story. On the level of content, Ruth herself endeavours to strengthen her deictic contemporaneity with Nao’s narration by synchronising the pace of her reading with the pace of Nao’s writing (see 38). This pretended con-temporaneity becomes actual when the words of the diary stop at a criti-cal point in Nao’s narrative at which both she and her father are about to commit suicide. Ruth, who is sure that words had fi lled every page until the end of the book when she had checked before, is fl abbergasted. Eventually, she goes to bed and has a dream in which she intervenes in Nao’s story. She wakes up to fi nd more pages of the diary fi lled, the nar-rative continuing where it had previously ended. The novel here clearly departs from what could otherwise be called its quasi- autobiographical realism (the Ruth of the novel shares many biographical details with the author herself) to remind readers of its fi ctionality . While Nao’s usage of the present-tense is entirely mimetically justifi able and never implies an impossible simultaneity of action and narration , it becomes fantastic in that her narration emerges as impossibly contemporaneous with Ruth’s act of reading. Because her narrative evolves in the present tense, her end


is still uncertain and Ruth can affect it. Meanwhile, Ruth’s own impossible intervention in Nao’s story through her dream is itself narrated in the present tense. Departing from its mimetic basis in reality, the novel thus foregrounds its own fi ctionality. After all, as Ruth knows, ‘[f]iction had its own time and logic. That was its power’ (314). In fi ction, in other words, the supposed temporal distance between Nao’s present tense and Ruth’s past tense , and the reader’s present, is tenuous at best.

As its title indicates, the novel’s investment in issues of time goes beyond this play with the deictic qualities of the present tense and the instability of fi ctional tenses. Quite appropriately, refl ecting the tensing of their narra-tives, Nao has a childhood obsession with capturing the true meaning of ‘now’ (98) and refl ects on the time philosophy of the thirteenth-century Zen master Dōgen, who explains that each day consists of 6,400,099,980 moments, each of which ‘provides an opportunity to re-establish our will’ (62) . Ruth, for her part, is constantly preoccupied with the past : she is trying (and failing) to write a memoir, worrying about what happened to Nao and anxious about her mother’s Alzheimer’s and her own possible vulnerability to the same illness. Finally, Oliver, Ruth’s artist husband, is planting trees in an art project for the future . Throughout this, the time philosophy of Dōgen serves as a kind of leitmotif . These issues merit more attention than I can give them here, but in terms of the novel’s interlock-ing of present- and past-tense narration , a quotation by Dōgen, which serves as an epigraph to Part III of the novel, in particular seems relevant: ‘every being that exists in the entire world is linked together as moments in time, and at the same time they exist as individual moments of time. Because all moments are the time being, they are your time being’ (259). As this epigraph seems to indicate, Ruth might be wrong to oppose the time of fi ction to that of reality. Rather, this suggests that all moments of time are connected and should be recognised and perhaps even inhabited as one’s own. In the act of reading, fi ction can realise this potential.

As a fi nal example of a fi rst-person narrative deictic use of the present tense I would like to briefl y mention Tan Twan Eng’s historical novel The Garden of Evening Mists (2012). The way the present tense is used in this novel is interesting in particular in comparison with the previous exam-ples. Eng’s novel features a present-tense frame, in which the protagonist Yun Ling, at the end of her life and threatened by a disease which will make her lose her ability to understand language, decides to write down

28 I. HUBER

an account of her past . Rather than merely referring to her act of writing, however, the deictic present develops a plot of its own in which some of the unsolved questions and relations of Yun Ling’s past are resolved.

All the examples I have discussed so far endeavoured to develop mimet-ically recuperable narrative situations, even if mimetic realism is eventually undermined in A Tale for the Time Being . The Garden of Evening Mists , in contrast, also indicates a clear deictic centre for the account of Yun Ling’s past, but this narrative position cannot serve as a deictic centre for the development of the present-tense plot. Yun Ling refl ects on her writing process and on rereading what she has written, but the present-tense pas-sages go considerably beyond this traditional role of the deictic present. They recount events in her current life, her interactions with other people and her plans for the future . While explicitly providing a scenario for the narration of Yun Ling’s past , the developments in her present are narrated in a simultaneous present for which no mimetically recuperable narrative situation emerges . This creates a certain tension, since the novel’s usage of a deictic present tense draws explicit attention to the act of narration and the failure of the novel to account for the narration of the present-tense plot thus becomes even more strongly conspicuous. At the same time, while the accuracy of the past-tense narration is predictably called into doubt by Yun Ling’s admitted memory gaps, the present-tense narration is not subjected to such doubts and makes unrestricted truth claims. In this sense, the novel endeavours to exploit the conventional association of past tense with fi ction and present tense with fact . However, once the deictic present tense itself becomes narrative, this distinction no longer holds. The novel, though, shows no awareness of this. It is self-conscious about the act of narration on the diegetic level, but entirely silent concern-ing the impossibility of its extradiegetic narration. Its gesture towards a postmodernist awareness of the constructedness and unreliability of his-tory and memory is thus merely skin-deep. At the same time, a mimeti-cally recuperable narrative situation is evidently no longer an indispensable condition for mimetic truth-claims of a historical fi ction like The Garden of Evening Mists . Its self-refl exivity remains limited to the level of story and does not include refl ection on the novel’s own discourse . The novel thus fl irts with unreliability on one level but establishes mimetic claims on the other, while at the same time exposing itself as fi ction by the impossibility of its narrative perspective.


FIGURAL NARRATION Traditionally, a deictic present tense would necessitate the use of the fi rst person, either by a fi rst- person narrator, or by an overt authorial narrator commenting on their act of narration. In the case of Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, however, I suggest that one could speak of a fi gural deictic present, since all three parts feature a fi gural narrative structure based on an alternation between past-tense narration and passages in nar-rative deictic present tense, which increasingly develop their own plotline . Both narrative strands extensively use free indirect discourse and mark the refl ector of the present-tense narration as the deictic centre. Oryx and Crake (2003), the fi rst part of the trilogy, combines the present situation of its refl ector-protagonist Snowman in a post-apocalyptic world, in which he believes himself to be the only human survivor, with his remembrances of his pre-apocalyptic past as Jimmy. The present-tense narrative serves to provide a framework and a justifi cation for the past-tense reminiscences in which Snowman remembers the developments that led to the epidemic which has wiped out mankind but left him alive. Nonetheless, the narra-tive present also develops its own plotline. The apocalypse may be the end of one story, the end of Jimmy, but it also marks the beginning of a new story, that of Snowman. Meanwhile, Snowman’s story is appropriately narrated in the present tense, since both past and future have lost their meaning with the obliteration of mankind. Snowman’s watch has stopped and human time-measurement has become futile. But there is also no future position from which Snowman’s story could be told in retrospect and the uncertainty about the possibility of such a future is a central con-cern of the novel. Indeed, only the use of the present tense makes the brilliant, excruciatingly open ending of the novel possible. Feverish and weak, Snowman sees three other humans and realises that he is not the only survivor. Hidden behind a bush he considers his next action:

What next? Advance with a strip of bedsheet tied to a stick waving a white fl ag? I come in peace . But he doesn’t have his bedsheet with him.

Or, I can show you much treasure . But no, he has nothing to trade with them, nor they with him. Nothing except themselves. They could listen to him, they could hear his tale, he could hear theirs. They at least would understand something of what he’s been through.

Or, Get the hell off my turf before I blow you off , as in some old-style Western fi lm. Hands up. Back away. Leave that spraygun. That wouldn’t be the end of it though. There are three of them and only one of him. They’d

30 I. HUBER

do what he’d do in their place: they’d go away, but they’d lurk, they’d spy. They’d sneak up on him in the dark, conk him on the head with a rock. He’d never know when they might come.

He could fi nish it now, before they see him, while he still has the strength. […] But they haven’t done anything bad, not to him. Should he kill them in cold blood? Is he able to? And if he starts killing them and then stops, one of them will kill him fi rst. Naturally.

‘What do you want me to do?’ he whispers to the empty air. It’s hard to know. […] From habit he lifts his watch; it shows him its blank face. Zero hour,

Snowman thinks. Time to go. (432–3; original italics)

I have quoted the ending of the novel extensively because I see in it the main justifi cation for the novel’s usage of the present tense. Snowman’s dilemma is absolute, unsolvable and deeply tragic, but can only be so as long as it remains in the present moment, at zero hour. Once it enters into the narrative past a decision has already been taken.

The use of the present tense thus fulfi ls a dual function: On the one hand, it emphasises the almost unimaginable distance between Jimmy’s past and Snowman’s present, which is dramatically changed. On the other hand, it is radically open towards a future which is entirely unpredictable because its post-apocalyptic setting is unprecedented. At the same time, in an intriguing temporal twist, the past the novel portrays is, from the perspective of contemporary readers, an all-too-predictable near future . Atwood perceptively picks up aspects of contemporary late capitalism and develops her dystopian scenario by bringing these to their logical conclu-sion (e.g. if there is profi t to be made from selling medicine, the pharma-ceutical industry must have an interest in creating health problems only their own products can alleviate). If Snowman’s future is radically uncer-tain, our own future as readers appears to be almost unavoidable.

We fi nd similar narrative structures in the further parts of the trilogy, even though their narrative structure becomes more complicated and includes different perspectives. The Year of the Flood (2009) combines the fi gural perspective of Toby with Ren’s fi rst- person narrative and speeches of Adam One addressing his followers of the religious community, called God’s Gardeners. Toby’s present-tense narrative follows a similar struc-ture as Snowman’s does in Oryx and Crake , initially providing primar-ily a frame for a past-tense narration of memories of her life before the ‘Waterless Flood’ of the epidemic. Gradually, though, the present-tense


narrative strand becomes ever more central, particularly so with the arrival of Ren. Ren’s fi rst- person narration equally combines memories of the past with an account of her situation after the catastrophe, but for the most part it sticks to the past tense and only switches to a consistent pres-ent tense once she meets Toby and their stories merge. Meanwhile, Adam One’s addresses are not narrative, but performative monologues, even though, in their progression through the years, they constitute a kind of narrative of their own. Moreover, the issue becomes even more complex in The Year of the Flood , since, as the chapter headings indicate, the events narrated by Ren in past tense coincide with the events of Toby’s present- tense narrative, while Adam One’s speeches coincide temporally with the past-tense reminiscences of both the former. Though each of the plotlines in itself progresses chronologically, the novel is thus achronological, not only on the level of discourse —jumping back and forth from one plot-line to the next—but also on the level of narration: Ren’s (retrospective) moment of enunciation must lie in the future of Toby’s co-present narra-tion, while Adam’s speeches lie in both their pasts. Only once Toby and Ren have met towards the end of the novel, and thus after the tense switch in Ren’s narration, do their moments of enunciation coincide, and even Adam One’s speeches at that point catch up with the present .

It may almost seem as if Atwood was aiming to soften the paradoxes of fi rst- person present-tense narration by keeping Ren’s narrative in the past tense and only switching to simultaneous narration once Ren’s story merges with Toby’s present. Due to this, Ren’s narrative features some rather weird tense transition, since its very fi rst chapter does intro-duce a deictic present in which Ren is trapped in a safe room at Scales. Subsequently, however, this deictic present is silently subsumed into the past-tense narrative. Ren’s rescue from the safe room is narrated in the past tense , and no new deictic present situation is clearly established. When the present tense emerges again in Ren’s narrative towards the end of the book, after she has joined Toby, it does so as a simultaneous present tense proper, but its introduction has been eased by Toby’s fi gural present tense. By that time, moreover, the plot has developed its dynamic to such an extent as to push questions about the narrative situation into the back-ground. The novel therefore establishes a narrative deictic rationale for its use of the present tense, only to supersede it. In the combination of fi gural and fi rst- person perspectives, the paradoxes of fi rst- person present- tense narration are thereby largely obscured and defused.

32 I. HUBER

The present-tense narrative eventually brings the story to the same point in time and space at which Oryx and Crake had ended, offering a resolu-tion to the open ending of that novel, only to substitute another open ending of its own. The present-tense rationale is therefore similar in The Year of the Flood as in Oryx and Crake : the future is radically uncertain and the narrative set-up denies the comfort of a future moment of retrospective narration. At the same time, the tense shift serves to mark the radical dif-ference between the past before and the present after the Waterless Flood.

The last part of the trilogy, MaddAddam (2013), however, eventu-ally reintroduces the future into Atwood’s post-apocalyptic world. Once again, this novel combines a narrative strand from before the epidemic—this time the story of Zeb—with a deictic present in which this story is told but which also develops its own plotline. Zeb’s narrative appears in two different versions: he tells Toby his story (though, once again, it is rendered not as a fi rst- person but as a fi gural narrative with extensive usage of free indirect discourse) and Toby tells his story in a simplifi ed and infan-tilized way as a kind of bed-time story to the new innocent humanoid race of the Crakers. Thus the novel combines Toby’s fi gural present-tense nar-rative in which she starts keeping a journal, scenes of unmediated dialogue between Toby and Zeb, the fi gural past-tense account of Zeb’s past, and Toby’s past-tense bed-time stories.

From this narrative set-up it already becomes evident that MaddAddam is centrally concerned with the way stories are being passed on, with myth-making and the preservation of the past for the future and thus with the way in which the present turns into a narrative past. In his study About Time , Mark Currie observes that ‘fi ctional narrative encourages us to think of the past as present no more than it encourages us to think of the present as a future past’ (5). While Currie ’s understanding of narrative takes retrospective past-tense narration for granted and does not consider present-tense narration, I would argue that Atwood’s use of the present tense in MaddAddam is based on a consequent realisation of the aspect of anticipation which Currie identifi es in all narrative. While usually, as Currie points out, ‘[n]arrative is understood as retrospection more readily than it is understood as anticipation,’ present-tense narration as Atwood uses it in MaddAddam foregrounds anticipation, in which ‘the present is the object of a future memory, and we live it as such, in anticipation of the story we will tell later, envisaging the present as past’ (5). In contrast to the fi rst two parts of the trilogy, MaddAddam reinstalls the future . Both Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood are focused entirely on memo-


ries of the past and on immediate survival in the present . There is no room for the future in the imagination of their characters or in their narrative setup. What was unimaginable in the fi rst two parts of the trilogy becomes a possibility in MaddAddam , though: Toby’s act of writing her journal and telling her stories suggests an increasing belief that there might be a future to which stories and knowledge could be passed on, even though this future seems at fi rst very doubtful: ‘She could go further, and record the ways and sayings of the now-vanished God’s Gardeners for the future ; for generations yet unborn, as politicians used to say […]. If there is any-one in the future , that is; and if they’ll be able to read; which, come to think of it, are two big ifs ’ (166; original emphasis). Gradually, though, the present-tense plotline confi rms that such a future will indeed exist as Toby passes on her knowledge and teaches the Craker child Bluebeard how to read and write. At a later point in the novel, Toby’s doubts about her journal no longer concern primarily whether there will be someone who will be able to read it, but rather what kind of knowledge will have to be transmitted: ‘What else to write, besides the bare-facts daily chronicle she’s begun? What kind of story—what kind of history will be of any use at all, to people she can’t know will exist, in the future she can’t foresee?’ (249). This present-tense narration follows the logic of anticipation, of passing on not only the past , but also the present to a future whose exis-tence is becoming ever more certain.

Moreover, in a fi nal narrative tense twist, the mode of anticipation which governs the novel eventually swings back into retrospection. Introducing a retarding moment at a point of high narrative tension in the present-tense plot, Atwood adds a proleptic deictic comment, but intriguingly does so using the past tense : ‘When reciting the story in later years, Toby liked to say that the Pigoon carrying Snowman-the-Jimmy fl ew like the wind. […] At the time, things are somewhat different’ (426–7). With this inser-tion, which adds a further deictic level, the narrative deictic present tense turns out to be a retrospective present tense. At the same time, a future from which even Toby’s story-telling becomes an object of retrospective contemplation is affi rmed. And indeed, only a few pages later, Blackbeard takes over the narrative, thus establishing the continuity of the tale beyond Toby’s present and existence, opening the perspective towards the future (fi ve babies are born within the novel’s last few pages to drive this point home beyond doubt).

The narrative setup is thus similar in all parts of the trilogy, with a deictic present-tense narration framing past-tense narratives, while the

34 I. HUBER

present-tense sections develop their own plot and become ever more cen-tral in the course of the novels. Nevertheless, there is a subtle change in the implications of the usage of the present tense, from a focus on the unprecedented present , on immediate survival and the uncertainty of the existence of any future in the fi rst two parts, to an affi rmation of the future and a focus on story-telling in the mode of anticipation in the last part of the trilogy. Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy may therefore well serve as a refutation of critical voices which associate present-tense narration with an impoverishment of temporal complexity. Clearly, present-tense narration has the potential to develop a temporal complexity easily on a par with, albeit different in emphasis to, past-tense narration .

AUTHORIAL NARRATION While deictic usage of the present-tense traditionally occurs most fre-quently in authorial narration, a narrative deictic authorial narration implies some fundamental contradictions. As soon as a deictic present tense becomes narrative by developing its own plotline , the commenting narrator would turn into a character proper, and would therefore have to be discussed as an example for either fi gural or fi rst- person narration.

The only example I know of which could be discussed as a kind of authorial narrative deictic usage of the present tense can be found in another novel by Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin (2000). One part of the book consists of a novel within a novel which uses the present tense throughout. It is written by one of the characters, is also called The Blind Assassin , and describes a secret affair between an unnamed man and woman, in which the man tells the woman a science-fi ction story about a blind assassin. The present tense is used both for the deictic frame in which the love affair between the man and the woman evolves, and for the science-fi ction story which the man invents. While in the examples discussed above, a tense change marked the temporal distance between a past-tense narrative and the narrative deictic present-tense frame, in this case the distance is not a temporal, but an ontological one. Instead of using the present tense to evoke factuality , the fact that no change of tense occurs in this case serves to highlight the fi ctionality of the science-fi ction story by emphasising the process of imaginative composition. The story is in the course of being imagined and narrated and its trajectory is as yet uncertain and open for negotiation . As for the frame tale itself, in addition to its deictic usage of the present tense it is highly dramatic or performa-


tive in the sense that it consists to a considerable degree of dialogue , with only brief narrative passages in between. Once again in this case, the narrative deictic present-tense frame increasingly gains in importance, even to the point of entirely supplanting the metadiegetic narrative. The science-fi ction story becomes a ground for negotiation of the values and ideologies of the lovers, but peters out long before the end of the novel and is never even ultimately concluded, but instead given several alterna-tive endings.

The function of commentary typical for the deictic present tense is in this case developed not by a single narrator but in dialogue . Instead of using a deictic present tense to offer authoritative judgements on the nar-rative, readers are offered different opinions and even different versions of the science-fi ction story in strife with each other. By introducing a narra-tive dimension into the deictic present moment, both creation and inter-pretation of the story are exposed as acts with ideological implications. Even while the narrative perspective of the frame-tale may fi t best in the category of authorial narration, it thus offers no conclusive commentary, but individualised and subjective points of view.

CONCLUDING REMARKS In contemporary usage, deictic present-tense references often go beyond their traditionally marginal and mostly non- narrative status. The moment of narration itself turns into a narrative event—frequently even a pivotal one. If deictic references always foreground the moment of narration and serve to comment on the narrative events, such narrative deictic usage goes beyond this to refl ect on the act of narration and the role and effect it has in the narrator’s present. At the same time, a tension may arise between the self-awareness of narration on the level of the story and the obfuscation of the narrative circumstances for a novel’s discourse , as was the case in Eng’s The Garden of Evening Mists .

One prominent effect of the narrative deictic present tense, as we have seen both in Atwood’s trilogy and in Ozeki’s and Tóibín’s novels, may be to open the act of narration up towards an uncertain future . In none of these cases, however, does this open future truly remain open . In The Testament of Mary , the reader’s historical knowledge confi rms Mary’s fears and the futility of her attempts to rescue the truth. After radically unset-tling her protagonist Nao and leading her to the brink of suicide, Ozeki’s metaleptic trickery brings both storylines of the novel to a somewhat

36 I. HUBER

jarringly perfect happy ending. Nao’s future , which seems for a moment truly uncertain, is thus reintegrated into Ruth’s retrospective narrative and no loose ends are allowed to remain hanging. In Atwood’s trilogy, fi nally, the fi rst two parts use the present tense to truly indicate an open future and can do so because they are set in a dystopian near-future. The third part, however, reinstates the future by introducing a retrospective perspective. Even the deictic present of the lovers in The Blind Assassin is retrospectively resolved and concluded in the novel’s main plotline. By turning the deictic present into a narrative moment in its own right, it seems, it eventually has to be recuperated within a narrative causality which is established retrospectively. Most of the examples I have discussed here thus court the possibilities of a narrative deictic present tense to open up to true uncertainty only to eventually bow to the reader’s desire for closure.



CHAPTER 4

Abstract This chapter considers novels which use the present tense to narrate events that are nevertheless construed to lie in the narrator’s past. The retrospective character of narration is frequently marked by context or by commentary, which makes it clear that the narrative perspective is not a simultaneous one. Examples for this group of texts are abundant, and the discussion considers novels like John Burnside’s Glister , Anne Enright’s The Gathering , Rachel Seiffert’s The Dark Room and Tom McCarthy’s C .

Keywords present-tense narration • retrospection • historical present

Numerous contemporary novels use present-tense narration in a retro-spective sense. Such use of the present tense is closely related to (and often subsumed under) the conventional historical present (see Casparis 73–4). As has been pointed out before, the historical present is frequently found in literature as well as in oral or conversational narratives and usu-ally serves to mark narrative peaks or moments of transition (see Fludernik ‘Historical Present Tense’; Schiffrin; Wolfson). However, both in oral nar-ration and in literary developments of the form it is generally dependent on more or less frequent tense shifts . The effect of the historical present thus relies on the past-tense narration in which it is embedded.

In contemporary fi ction, however, retrospective present-tense narra-tion is often used consistently, without any referentially unmotivated tense

Retrospective Narration

switching , while the past tense is exclusively used for analepses. I would thus differentiate such consistent retrospective usage from the traditional, intermittent usage of the historical present . A retrospective present tense becomes the normal narrative tense and is no longer marked as a deviation which gains its effect by contrast to the past-tense context. Retrospective usage can often only be distinguished from simultaneous narration within the narrative context, for example by moments of hindsight and narrative distance indicating a retrospective point of view. In spite of its frequent inconspicuity, this distinction is often crucial to the specifi c use and effects the present tense is put to.

FIRST-PERSON NARRATION Sometimes, retrospective narration can be almost indistinguishable from simultaneous narration. John Egan, 12-year-old narrator of M. J. Hyland’s Carry Me Down (2006), for example, tells his story in a sober present tense, which appears to be simultaneous . John records events and his reactions to them in a non- sequitur style in which causal connections emerge only gradu-ally and readers are left to piece together much of the situation of his family on their own. John’s childish perspective and understanding are limited and he fails to grasp connections which the reader is challenged to make. At the same time, John’s narrative voice is strangely detached. He records events, actions and his feelings but does so for the most part without explanation or evaluation and he often fails to empathise with his surroundings. This detachment from himself and from his surroundings culminates at the cen-tral moment of crisis in the novel, when John nearly kills his mother, smoth-ering her with a pillow. Even though readers share John’s perspective, his actions are often inexplicable and it remains just as unclear to the reader as to the police offi cers who are being called to the scene whether John intended harm, or whether his action was a misguided attempt to help his mother.

For the most part, the use of the present tense in this novel could be read as a simultaneous narration. However, there are a few occasions which would suggest a retrospective point of view. This is most obvious in John’s reference to his fi rst night in a boys’ detention centre: ‘As I move to stand, the chair falls out from under me. And that is the last thing I remember of my fi rst night in the Parnell Square Home for Boys’ (289). In this passage there is a clear temporal split between the experiencing I and the I of memory and narration . It might seem fi nical to insist on a single passage suggesting retrospection in a novel which otherwise seems

40 I. HUBER

to fi t the category of simultaneous narration. However, I would like to suggest that the difference between narrative retrospection or simultaneity has considerable implications for the interpretation of the novel’s ending. At the end of the novel the family is reunited, with all misdeeds forgiven and misfortunes averted. If the narration is read as simultaneous , the end-ing seems to promise a new start for the family, facing the future together. In the light of retrospective narration, however, John’s continuing lack of self-refl exivity , empathy and remorse throw a sinister light on the happy picture. Failing to refl ect on his past just as much as he fails to refl ect on his present , the stability he and his family have regained appears brittle at best and new acts of (unwonted) violence seem to wait threateningly just beyond the horizon. The very ambiguity of the present tense, which is hard to be ultimately identifi ed as simultaneous or retrospective, thus adds a layer of complexity to the novel, making its narrative perspective as intriguing as it is disturbing.

Barbara Gowdy’s The Romantic (2003) is both more obvious and more typical in its usage of the retrospective present tense. The present tense is used in this case to evoke the vividness of memory in a story of loss. The protagonist attempts to come to terms with her memo-ries of her tumultuous relationship with her lover Adam, who died at a young age. The introduction to the novel clearly specifi es the moment of narration as three years after Adam’s death and the accuracy of the ‘pawed-over resurrections’ (2) that are the narrator’s memories are called explicitly into question. The present tense used throughout the narrative goes some way to counteract this commonplace of unreliable memory, however, since its effect is to emphasise vividness and immediacy , eas-ily letting the reader forget the ostensible retrospective distance. Apart from an emphasis on the timeless endurance of the protagonist’s love there seems to be little necessity to the choice of the present tense over the past tense in this novel.

Similar in topic, though the deceased who is mourned is a brother, not a lover, Anne Enright’s The Gathering (2007) offers a rather more complex picture. The novel uses the present tense throughout as the predominant tense of retrospective narration, although there is also some tense switch-ing . The Gathering is obsessed with memory and the past , as Veronica, its narrator-protagonist, attempts to come to terms with the history of her family and in particular the recent death of her brother Liam. Meanwhile, the temporal structure of the novel is fairly complex: the moment of nar-ration falls into an undetermined point in time after Liam’s wake, but

RETROSPECTIVE NARRATION 41

the present-tense narrative covers Veronica’s journey to retrieve Liam’s body, her memories of the family’s past and in particular the traumatic child abuse which she blames for Liam’s death, as well as her attempt to reimagine her grandmother’s past . The novel thus combines a simultane-ous usage of the present tense with extensive retrospective present- tense narration.

Intriguingly, the present tense acquires a different effect on each tem-poral level. Where the narrative deals with Veronica’s life after Liam’s death the present tense is often used in an iterative sense, indicating stasis and monotony. Even where events are recounted that happen only once, the frequent iterative use of the present tense in these sections of the narrative serves to imply how much Veronica is trapped in her life. The present tense is also consistently used to refer to the events between Liam’s death and his wake. This present-tense usage points to the moment when Veronica’s life stalled. With Liam’s death Veronica’s life goes on hold, becomes stuck in the present of those days until his wake. Meanwhile, in reference to Veronica’s childhood memories , the present tense alternates much more frequently with the past tense . Similarly to the traditional usage of the historical present , the present tense is used in this context for rhetorical effect, to heighten vividness . It is also used repeatedly in an explicit evocation of memory: ‘Here’s me, at the age of three, with my ear pressed against the beige tin cliff of her [grandmother’s] washing machine […] Here’s me eating Ada’s rubber bathing hat whose famous yellow fl owers appeared in my nappy the next day. […] Did this happen?’ (99). By using the present tense in this way, Veronica emphasises the workings of her memory, which does not only state facts about the past (in past tense ), but also brings forth vivid images whose truth may be contested . Finally, Veronica uses the present tense almost consistently in her explicitly imaginary account of her grandmother’s past. On this level, the present tense serves to empha-sise the fi ctionality of this story, which Veronica sits down to write in the attempt to deal with Liam’s death. Her grandmother, grandfather and their dubious friend Nugent are brought before her mind’s eye as fi gments of her imagination , even less reliable and substantial than her childhood memories .

The Gathering is a perfect example of the temporal complexities which present-tense narration is capable of sustaining, in agreement with Dorrit Cohn ’s assessment and in clear refutation of some of its critics. As Enright’s use of narrative tense shows very well, difference in tense is not

42 I. HUBER

indispensable in order to establish a distance between a narrating I and an experiencing I . The use of the present tense does, however, suggest something about the immediacy and vividness of memory as opposed to the rationally processed mediation of the past tense . The Gathering also illustrates well that the meaning and effect of the present tense in narra-tion depends strongly on the context in which it is employed. Further, Enright’s novel refutes the suggestion put forward by Casparis that the present tense is only appropriate for non- sequitur novels (62–71). While this observation does apply to the temporal level of narration in which Veronica’s life seems to be foreshortened to an iterative present, it fails to take the retrospective usages of the present tense into view. The present tense can offer a number of intriguing aesthetic possibilities to a novel that is so obsessed with recalling the past and with traumatic memory. Finally, The Gathering is exemplary in that it is not in the least concerned to offer its readers a plausible scenario for Veronica’s act of simultaneous narra-tion. Veronica tells her story in the present tense no matter whether she is sleeping, driving or sitting on an aeroplane, whether she is remembering, inventing or experiencing.

There are interesting parallels to some of these observations in a novel of a very different kind: John Burnside’s deeply unsettling Glister (2008). Burnside’s novel addresses the impossibility implied in present-tense nar-ration directly, introducing its narrator Leonard as suspended in a strange state between life and death in which he repeats his story again and again. Time in this place has no meaning, is a constant present : ‘It’s always now, and everything— past and future , problem and resolution, life and death—everything is simultaneous here, at this point, in this moment’ (2). His entire story becomes present in this moment, in his impossible narration, and therefore the present tense seems entirely appropriate. Moreover, just as we have seen in the case of The Gathering , the way memory works is conceived of as particularly visual : ‘To begin again, to forget at last, all I need do is imagine a man standing by himself in a poisoned wood—not on the one occasion I saw him there, but earlier, at some point when his secret was still intact’ (4). The temporal distance is clarifi ed by context, but the present tense indicates the visual evocation of the past as well as stressing the act of imagining .

At the same time, Leonard is (impossibly) taking on the role of an omniscient narrator, telling not only his own story, but also that of policeman Morrison, of his girlfriend Elsbeth and other inhabitants of Innertown, his erstwhile home. While Leonard’s narrative voice entirely


recedes from view in the third- person chapters, the consistent use of the present tense may serve as a subtle reminder of the narrative situation, and thus imply that the story we are reading is Leonard’s own, quite possibly misguided, interpretation of events. Just as the use of the present tense in Veronica’s narrative about her grandmother Ada in The Gathering served to emphasise the fi ctionality of this version of the past , the present tense in The Glister may hint at unreliability . Meanwhile, Glister is certainly not a non-sequitur novel: it has the basic plot-structure of a thriller and Leonard acts as a youthful sleuth. Instead of emphasising ‘sequence of action before recognition of consequence and causality’ ( Casparis 67), the present tense in this case calls into question narrative reliability and therefore the causal connections and interpretations of sequences which the narrative establishes. The possibility of such misinterpretation falls horribly into place in the novel’s highly disturbing and ambiguous fi nal scene:

[T]his time I see it clearly: a body, suspended in the half-light, the ruined frame of a boy hanging in the air like Icarus falling in some old painting […]. I’d thought he was dead when I glimpsed him before; now I see that he is badly cut, but still alive, the dark blood dripping from his face and hands, his body bound in something bright, swaying slightly in the air, his mouth open, it seems, as if he wants to say something, or wanted to say something a moment before - and now I know why I want to remember all this as if it had happened in the past , even though I know it continues in the present , because the boy isn’t trying to speak, he’s screaming, and the boy is me, only it’s me in some parallel version of the story. (254)

The bright suspended state between life and death which the beginning of the novel introduces as the moment of narration receives a horrible interpretation at its end: the result of a mind in extreme pain and close to death, with life passing before the inner eye and an out-of-body sensation so often associated with near-death experiences.

By this I do not mean to downplay the multiple and irreducible ambi-guities of the novel and especially of the fi nal scenes. Nevertheless, once one considers the implications of the novel’s peculiar present-tense narra-tion by a fi rst-person omniscient narrator in the light of this ending, the reliability of the third- person chapters has to be called into question. With this, Glister presents a highly intriguing example of a usage of the narra-tive present-tense which is not only thematically or structurally motivated

44 I. HUBER

or used to create specifi c rhetorical effects but affects the very meaning of the novel itself.

FIGURAL NARRATION The single author who has probably had the greatest infl uence on the con-temporary popularity of present-tense narration is Nobel-prize winning J. M. Coetzee . Coetzee generally favours the present tense, and employs it in the majority of his novels. To pick out just one, his fi ctionalised autobiographical novel Summertime (2009) is particularly interesting, precisely because it does not use straightforward present-tense narration throughout. Rather, the novel tells its story in the form of a series of inter-views conducted by an academic who wants to write a biography of John Coetzee’s life in the 1970s. Intriguingly, these interviews are supposed to happen after Coetzee’s death. While the novel treats historical and auto-biographical material, its narrative situation is therefore located sometime in the future . In this combination of historical material and a future nar-rative point of view the novel creates a sustained tension between fact and fi ction throughout. In addition to the interviews, the novel opens and closes with extracts from what purports to be notebook entries, made by Coetzee in the 1970s. These notebook entries talk about Coetzee in the third person as ‘he’ and do so in the present tense. Furthermore, each entry concludes with brief notes for possible further development as fi c-tional material. The interviews, for their part, mostly use a conventional past tense , as the interviewees recount their memories of Coetzee. There is one exception: For the interview with Coetzee’s cousin Margot, Mr Vincent, the interviewer, has compiled a text from a previous interview and reads it to Margot for her comment and approval. Instead of keeping the interview form, Mr Vincent has created an uninterrupted narrative with dramatic elements and has chosen the present tense for its presenta-tion. This is interesting in the context of this study because the choice of the present tense is in this case reserved for a kind of narration that is more formalised, more consciously crafted. The notebook entries are explicitly marked as material for fi ction by the comments that are added to them and Margot’s story has been rewritten and stylistically touched up by Mr Vincent. Instead of suggesting more immediacy , in the context of this novel, the present tense indicates a higher level of stylisation .

While possibly infl uenced by his compatriot Coetzee , Damon Galgut uses the present tense in a rather different way. His novel In a Strange


Room (2010) sits somewhat uneasily between third and fi rst- person narra-tion. Similar to the fi rst- person examples I have discussed above, Galgut’s present-tense usage stresses the vividness of memory , which recalls the past into the present . A contrast, however, lies in the way in which Galgut stresses the distance between his past experiencing self and his present nar-rating self by a shift in personal pronoun:

He sits on the edge of a raised stone fl oor and stares out unseeingly into the hills around him and now he is thinking of things that happened in the past . Looking back at him through time, I remember him remembering, and I am more present in the scene than he was. But memory has its own distances, in part he is me entirely, in part he is a stranger I am watching. (5)

While Galgut is telling his own story, he tells it with a marked distance to his past self, even though there are frequent occasions in which he changes from third to fi rst person even within the same sentence. If fi rst- person narration traditionally marked the distance between experiencing and narrating self through a tense change, Galgut achieves it by a change in personal pronoun. While both techniques stress the difference between the two subject positions, they do so under different conditions. The tra-ditional tense shift emphasises temporal lapse but maintains stability in identity, whereas Galgut’s solution evokes the power of memory to make the past present at the same time as highlighting the discontinuity of iden-tity. His past is present to him, but his past self remains a stranger.

The way in which the past may become present also plays a role in Rachel Seiffert’s novel The Dark Room (2001), which uses covert retro-spective present-tense narration in all three of its not directly related but thematically linked parts. Seiffert’s novel explores the question of guilt during and in the aftermath of the regime of the National Socialists in Germany . Each part is focalised primarily through its protagonist, respec-tively Helmut, Lore and Micha. Helmut’s story-line is set in Berlin and spans the fi rst 24 years of his life, from 1921 to 1945 and the end of the war. Handicapped from birth, Helmut is prevented from joining up, loses everyone he knows to bombing raids and eventually glories in the uni-form he is given when the desperate state of affairs calls even the old and weak to a last defence of the capital. Lore’s story sets in roughly where Helmut’s ends (though the storylines remain unconnected) and follows the fl ight of Lore and her siblings, children of a Nazi offi cial, from Bavaria to Hamburg, in the hope of fi nding their grandmother and shelter there. Finally, Micha’s storyline begins in 1995 and follows the attempts of the

46 I. HUBER

protagonist to fi nd out about and come to terms with his grandfather’s involvement in atrocities committed against Jewish people during the time he served in the Waffen SS.

While all three parts of the novel are narrated in the present tense, the retrospective point of view is most explicit in Helmut’s story-line. At the same time, in this part the use of a retrospective present tense is most clearly thematically justifi ed, as photographs play an important role. As Roland Barthes has argued so poetically, photographs offer a ‘certifi cate of presence’ (87). As ‘an emanation of past reality ’ (88; original empha-sis) they posit a ‘temporal hallucination’ (115). They call the past into the present and the retrospective present tense seems to suit their spe-cifi c paradoxical temporality perfectly. Helmut is apprenticed to a pho-tographer and attempts to document the gradual draining of people from Berlin. He thus uses photography in the attempt to capture an elusive present, which the photographs , however, fail to make sense of for him. Still, photographs are repeatedly evoked to authenticate the narrative and to present the narrative moment as present, but as a present that is viewed from a historical distance. While the narrative voice is for the most part fi g-ural, with Helmut as refl ector , in such moments the narrative voice more clearly emerges as distinct and retrospective. Most explicitly, this historical distance comes to the fore in the fi nal section of the part, in which a pho-tograph is taken of a proud Helmut:

The city behind him is destroyed and soon to be divided. In a matter of days a suicide will speed the Soviet invasion; the small mound of broken building beneath his feet will mark the line between what is British, what is French; and Helmut will not recognise his childhood home in the Berlin which is to come. But in this photo, Helmut is […] standing high on his rubble mountain, over which Soviet tanks will roll with ease, and he is smiling. (63)

The narrator intrudes here with historical knowledge which clearly marks the narrative perspective as retrospective. In such references to photo-graphs , the narrative evokes both the presentifying power of the photo-graph and highlights the temporal distance of the narrative position. The proximity suggested by the present tense is thus counteracted by the refer-ence to the photograph, which exemplifi es both the continuing presence of the past and its irreconcilable distance.

Neither Lore’s nor Micha’s story continues in quite this fashion, how-ever. Instead of fairly unproblematically recalling the past into the pres-ent , in Lore’s story photographs feature mostly as incriminating evidence


(both of her parent’s past as Nazis and of the crimes the Nazis commit-ted in the concentration camps), while in Micha’s story they mark the unbridgeable distance between past and present—the impossibility to reconcile happy family photographs of a much-beloved grandfather with the atrocities he must have committed. Even while the novel’s title might therefore indicate that the rationale of its present-tense usage might be that each of its storylines emerges like photographic evidence from a dark-room, neither Lore’s nor Micha’s story employ photographs in such a way. Lore’s story, similarly to Helmut’s part, also features moments imply-ing historical distance (e.g. when Lore sees photographs of the bodies of concentration camp victims, the narrative presumes its readers to be able to place the images in historical perspective). However, the distancing moments are not as obvious as in the previous part of the novel. Instead of evoking the presentifying power of photographs , the present tense allows this part of the narrative to slip almost seamlessly from narration of events into narration of dreams , emphasising Lore’s dreamlike state of mind, in which her experiences come to seem like a long nightmare. Micha’s story, fi nally, allows for no clear distinction between retrospective and simultane-ous narration. In this case, the present tense evokes contemporaneity and the continuous presence of past guilt. Even though the whole novel is narrated in the present tense, the way present-tense narration is employed in each of the three parts is thus signifi cantly different, each with different aesthetic effects and different implications. In spite of its concern with history and the historical progression marked by the individual parts, the use of the present tense reduces historical distance. The questions of guilt, of who is a perpetrator and who is a victim are not posed with historical hindsight (as Micha asks them), but the reader is immersed in the pres-ent moment of Helmut and Lore, in which these questions yet remain unanswered.

AUTHORIAL NARRATION There is a strong refl ector fi gure in Tom McCarthy’s novel C (2010), but nevertheless its narrative situation is more adequately described as autho-rial. Much of the narrative presents the perspective of the protagonist, Serge Carrefax, but the scope of the narrative voice is somewhat wider than Serge’s perspective, most obviously at the narrative’s beginning (which recounts Serge’s birth) and its end (Serge’s death). For a refl ector fi gure, Serge is also an uncommonly fl at character, machine-like in his lack

48 I. HUBER

of emotion and empathy. C is, once more, a historical novel , set at the beginning of the twentieth century (Serge is born in 1898) and covering the period of time in which literary modernism bloomed.

This is relevant since modernism is an important background and inspi-ration of the novel, which recalls modernist aesthetics by preferring the episodic to a linear, coherent narrative development and by largely refus-ing the depiction of rounded and developing characters. The modernist roots the novel draws on may also be one reason for its consistent use of the present tense. The modernists, however, as I have argued in Chap. 2 , in fact seldom opted for the narrative present tense, with the exception of the stream of consciousness technique. The narrative voice of C , however, though often focalised through Serge, rarely merges with the protago-nist’s thoughts to the degree of interior monologue . In this sense, C offers a kind of hybrid: the use of present-tense narration evokes the modernists’ attempts at immediate thought reproduction, but ultimately refuses the reader that much insight into the protagonist’s mind. Moreover, although the present tense is employed throughout, a certain distance of the narra-tive perspective is implied by an explicit (and only retrospectively possible) ordering of events. Thus a subchapter might start with: ‘Once, return-ing from the lines in fading light, […] Serge and Gibbs fi nd themselves landing on an aerodrome that’s not their own’ (143). McCarthy partly writes a realist historical novel and partly presents his readers with a mod-ernist experiment in layered meanings, symbolic connections, and coded references.

In its episodic structure and with its inscrutable and psychologically shallow protagonist, C could be seen as an example of a non- sequitur novel. Serge is obsessed with wireless communication and with connec-tions but nevertheless he seems unable or unwilling to bring his life and his surroundings into patterns of causality and meaning. In the central trau-matic moment of the novel, for example, Serge’s sister Sophie commits suicide after a love affair with one of their father’s friends, but although the reader may draw the necessary connections to understand this, Serge never seems to attempt to do so. The narrative present tense implies that it is always too early for judgement , which may lie in hindsight but which is continually deferred. At the same time, however, the novel challenges the reader to go on a search for clues, connections, causal sequences, which are constantly implied but seldom specifi ed. Meanwhile, such a search should never be taken as conclusive, as one of the character’s in the novel takes pains to point out: ‘The mistake most of my contemporaries


http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56213-5_2

make is to assume […] that their moment of looking is somehow defi ni-tive, standing outside of the long history of which it merely forms another chapter’ (278; original emphasis). A narrative in the present tense, which eschews the ostensible defi nitiveness of the past tense, may attempt to evade this mistake.

Meanwhile, with the development of wireless communication as one of its central themes, the novel offers some thematic justifi cation for its usage of the narrative present tense. Wireless communication, it has been claimed, created a new perception of the present at the begin-ning of twentieth century, since communication suddenly became nearly simultaneous (see Kern, especially 66–69). Another sense in which wire-less communication privileges the present is even more important to C , though: once emitted, so Serge’s father claims in the novel, radio waves remain forever present. ‘Wireless waves don’t die away after the ether disturbance is produced: they linger, clogging up the air and caus-ing interference. Half the static we’ve just waded through is formed by residues of old transmissions’ (196). In the traces of transmissions the past remains forever present. In the theory of Serge’s father, this not only applies to communication, but also to electrical emissions caused by strong emotions: ‘just imagine: if every exciting or painful event in history has discharged waves of similar detectability into the ether—why, we could pick up the Battle of Hastings, or observe the distress of the assassinated Caesar, or the anguish of St. Anthony during his great temptation. These things could still be happening, right now, around us’ (199). In this hopeful vision, the past is never lost to the present and remains indefi nitely decipherable. That this is a vain hope, however, is not only implied by Serge’s apparent scepticism, but rather by the fact that Serge himself is mostly unable or unwilling to make sense even of the present . He listens on the wireless to ‘songs, personal messages, phrases whose nature and purpose Serge can’t work out but has spent hours listening to nonetheless, charmed by the sequences’ sounds, the images that they evoke, their modulating repetitions’ (196). He makes no attempts to understand his sister’s death; he can make no sense out of the fl attened two-dimensional landscape he sees from his aircraft as a pilot in World War I; he makes no effort to grasp the political develop-ments he is involved in during his stay in Egypt. Both past and present may be present, but they are present as white noise which has to be not only detected but also decoded. Both Serge and the narrative voice, however, restrict themselves to the role of detector, making the use of

50 I. HUBER

present-tense narration appropriate. A retrospective refl ection and the attempt to decode the novel’s many signals remains a task for the reader.

In C , the retrospective nature of the present tense is only implicitly man-ifest in the way the narrative is ordered. In Charlotte Mendelson’s Almost English (2013), in contrast, the present tense is employed quite explicitly retrospectively. While the authorial narrator mostly remains covert and refrains from comment, the novel allows itself the occasional prolepsis, making the retrospective nature of its present tense explicit (see e.g. 115, 366). Whereas C offers some thematic justifi cation for its present- tense narration, however, the reason for Mendelson’s choice of this narrative tense is not directly apparent. There seems to be no reason why this novel about a mother and a daughter who struggle to fi nd their place in life and in British society and to acknowledge their love for each other again could not have been told just as well in the past tense .

Indeed, in retrospective narration, the present and the past tense appear to be perhaps all too easily interchangeable, particularly in the case of authorial narration. Julian Barnes’s Arthur & George (2005) amply illus-trates this. Another historical novel , Arthur & George is based on the case of George Edalji, who was wrongly condemned to three years of penal ser-vitude and whose partial exoneration was owed to a considerable degree to the enthusiastic support by Arthur Conan Doyle. While its present- tense passages are too extensive to be considered examples of a historical present primarily used for rhetorical effect , the novel frequently changes from past to present tense and back, not only between chapters but also within scenes. Initially, all chapters treating George’s part of the story are written in present tense, while Arthur’s story is narrated in past tense . This structure is reversed once the case against George is opened. The entire narration of George’s prosecution as well as the time he spends in gaol is narrated in the past tense , while Arthur’s story turns to the pres-ent tense once he meets the love of his life and future wife, Jean. Further onward, this order is again disrupted and the tenses change frequently even within chapters . Nonetheless, their usage does not appear entirely arbitrary. Generally, everything that refers directly to George’s case or to Arthur’s attempts to solve it is narrated in the past tense , while the narra-tion switches to the present tense every time Arthur’s relation to Jean is in the centre of narrative interest. Conversations between Arthur and George are also narrated in the present tense, as is the account of their respective (and simultaneous) reading of the fi nal offi cial report on George’s case. In the fi nal part of the novel, George learns of Arthur’s death in past tense ,


but the narrative switches to present tense in the last pages, when George attends the memorial séance.

While there is thus a certain pattern, the rationale behind the tense choice is not easy to determine. It little affects the style, the proximity of the narrative perspective to the protagonists or the ratio of scene, dialogue and description, or showing and telling, all of which stay fairly constant. Nor does it serve to distinguish one character from the other, since it is used for both George and Arthur intermittently. There merely seems to be a certain indication that the present tense is preferred for those aspects of the story of a more personal nature, with perhaps less verifi ed basis in historical fact : Arthur’s love affair and George’s youth , as well as their conversations with each other. In part, this may aim to emphasise the novel’s fi ctionality and to deliberately unsettle its historical authority . The present-tense passages emphasise the way in which readers experience the unfolding of the events of the story as present, notwithstanding their historical and retrospective embedding. Mainly, however, the effect seems to amount to a demonstration of the near exchangeability of the past and present tense in retrospective narration. The choice of tense is not mean-ingful in itself but can only be granted relevance in its aesthetic context. In its frequent tense changes , Arthur & George thus challenges the reader to search for and understand a pattern, even while it exercises its freedom as fi ction to employ all tense structures. The novel’s last words illustrate this most clearly:

[George] gazes through his succession of lenses, out into the air and beyond. What does he see? What did he see? What will he see? (386)

Irrespective of its tense, the question remains open since these are the novel’s last words. Meanwhile, to the reader, the three different tenses used here pose an additional, metatextual question: In a work of fi ction, even one based on historical fact , what is the difference?

CONCLUDING REMARKS Contemporary fi ction abounds with novels which employ a retrospec-tive present tense, regardless of their narrative perspective. Avanessian and Hennig , who have studied the effect of such a present-tense usage,

52 I. HUBER

particularly in historical novels , suggest that it has the opposite effect of the classical epic preterite. In the epic past tense , according to Avanessian and Hennig , ‘ presentifi cation constitutes a fi ctional (contem-poraneously past) present. Asynchrony , in contrast, constitutes a fi ctional (non- contemporaneously present) past’ ( Present Tense 65). If past-tense narration seems to suggest that a past that has happened is made present in the experience of reading, present-tense narration immediately sug-gests the fi ctionality of the past it presents. Some of the novels I have discussed in this chapter seem to confi rm this. In Arthur & George as well as Summertime , the present tense serves to emphasise fi ctionality or stylisation , the way that historical material is taken as a framework to reimagine not necessarily a factual but a possible past .

However, few of the novels I have encountered seem to quite fi t Avanessian and Hennig ’s conception of what they call the ‘altermodern novel’, which, according to them, uses present-tense narration to weaken teleology and chronology and can be seen to react to doubts in the fac-tuality of history . After all, both Arthur & George and Summertime mix past- and present-tense narration , and their relation to their historical material is therefore not exclusively defi ned by their choice of narrative tense. Arthur & George is, indeed, entirely chronological. Rather than questioning the factuality of history, in this case the present tense seems seems to strengthen the comparative facticity of the past- tense passages. Others, like Summertime and The Romantic do present their stories in a fairly achronological order, but once again, Summertime does so mostly in the past tense while The Romantic uses the present tense primarily to emphasise the vividness of memory and the endurance of the protagonist’s love. In fact, the presentifying power of memory is one of the recurring motifs of retrospective present-tense narration, particularly among the fi rst- person examples I have discussed. While the accuracy of the images memory evokes is frequently called into question, the emphasis is mostly on the continuing relevance of such vivid memories , rather than on their unreliability . Furthermore, such explorations of individual relations to one’s own past seem hardly what Avanessian and Hennig have in mind with their focus on historical novels . Moreover, in the two historical novels I have discussed in this chapter which both use the present tense consis-tently , C and The Dark Room , the tense choice seems to be mainly justifi ed by thematic concerns: wireless technology in C and photography in The Dark Room . Furthermore, both novels endeavour to place the reader in the present of their protagonists, who lack insight into their own historical


context . The present tense thus emphasises the reader’s advantage in historical hindsight over the protagonists. Instead of undermining history, the novels rely on their readers’ historical knowledge to enable them to situate and judge their protagonists and plots.

This is not to say that Avanessian and Hennig ’s assessment of an alter-modern present-tense narration is inaccurate. Rather, my point is that contemporary novels use a retrospective present tense in a variety of dif-ferent ways for which Avanessian ’s and Hennig ’s approach cannot entirely account. While fi ctionality , the imagination and unreliability are recurring concerns, so are the continuing presence and infl uence of the past on the present . Furthermore, the explicitness of the retrospective usage of the present tense actually saves the narrative situation from the fi ctionalising paradox of simultaneous narration. Far from being impossible or unimagi-nable, the narrative position is even explicitly spelled out in some of the examples I have discussed here. The retrospective use of the present tense is thereby marked as a rhetorical choice rather than a logical inconsistency, and it has to fi nd its explanation in rhetorical concerns. Finally, in some cases, like Carry Me Down or Glister , the temporal ambiguities of the present tense are exploited structurally, to open up the novels’ reading to several possible interpretations.

54 I. HUBER


CHAPTER 5

Abstract This chapter discusses novels, in which the impossibility of simultaneous narration is circumvented to some degree by presenting their narrative as an interior monologue of a character. Subchapters on fi rst-person (as, for example, David Mitchell’s number9dream or Emma Donoghue’s Room ) and fi gural interior monologues (as can be found, for example in Ali Smith’s The Accidental , or Will Self ’s Umbrella ) address the implied complete collapse of distance between narrator and narratee, as well as the relation such contemporary usage of interior monologues bears to its modernist antetype. Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others serves as a rare example of an authorial narration employing an interior monologue-type present tense.

Keywords present-tense narration • interior monologue • stream of consciousness • modernism

Neither narrative deictic nor retrospective narration necessarily challenge a mimetic framework of narration. Another way in which present-tense nar-ration can be resolved according to a mimetic narrative standard is to inter-pret it as an interior monologue and thus in effect as a narrative without a narratee. Because the narrative purports to refl ect the current thoughts of the protagonist, rather than to indicate a narrative situation for which there would be neither time nor location or addressee, the paradox of

Interior Monologue

simultaneous narration in which experience and representation impossibly coincide is avoided. Strikingly enough, however, a consistent usage of this kind of naturalisation of present-tense narration is fairly infrequent among the Man Booker Prize nominees from which I draw my examples. Even those cases that I discuss in this chapter for the most part only approximate the interior monologue. They depart from the radical modernist experi-ments with association and fragmented thought structure to develop inte-rior monologues that are strikingly narrative, presenting an entirely coherent line of thought and events. The usage of the present tense is justifi ed by the proximity of the narrative perspective to the perception of the protagonists, but there is rarely an attempt to depict thought structures realistically or to conceal an essentially narrative nature. Most of the contemporary examples I discuss in this chapter thus try to have it both ways: they emphasise interi-ority without any curtailing of narrativity . In practice, therefore, the bound-aries between interior monologue and simultaneous narration are often less than clear-cut. The difference lies mainly in the explicitness of the narrative address and thus in the degree to which a present-tense narrative makes it impossible for readers to resolve the paradox of its narration.

FIRST-PERSON NARRATION David Mitchell’s number9dream (2001), for instance, exploits the proxim-ity to the perception of the protagonist which is implied by the interior monologue, while still keeping a minimal narrative distance which allows for a coherent narrative structure. The narrative perspective is not entirely restricted to the narrator-protagonist Eiji’s thoughts, but also reports his and others’ actions and makes frequent use of indirect discourse, which implies narrative control. The novel encourages the reader to accept the narrative perspective as internal and unmediated, but it provides enough mediation to pose few obstacles to readers’ reception of it as a narrative. It is certainly far from the non- narrative tendencies of a stream of consciousness.

Meanwhile, the proximity of the interior monologue becomes instru-mental to the novel’s negotiation of different planes of perception. As the novel progresses, Eiji’s reality is mixed up with daydreams, games, mem-ory , nightmares, history , literature and dreams . Since there is next to no distance between the perceiving and the narrating perspective, readers are repeatedly confronted with these other planes of perception without prior warning and frequently have to reassess the reality status of what they are confronted with. This happens most insistently in the fi rst chapter,

56 I. HUBER

which fi nds the youth Eiji sitting in a café in Tokyo and contemplating his plans to confront his father’s lawyer, in order to discover his father’s identity, which is unknown to him. The chapter repeatedly and without warning drifts off into Eiji’s often fantastical daydreams, which the reader can only identify as such once they have stopped short abruptly and the narrative returns to the reality of Eiji, still sitting irresolutely in the café. There are no narrative cues which would indicate the reality status of what is narrated, as both daydream and reality are narrated in the same voice, with the same sci-fi inspired vocabulary and in the same present tense. Eiji’s daydreams are his present , and the reader follows his imagination in all its fl ights. The diffi culty in identifying the daydreams is further exac-erbated by the reader’s uncertainty about the novel’s genre at this early point. Eiji’s perception of Tokyo and his language are decidedly futuristic. For example, he speaks of the other people sitting in the café as ‘drones’. At this early stage, it is diffi cult for the reader to decide whether this is to be read fi guratively or literally. When one of Eiji’s daydreams then devel-ops a science-fi ction scenario, the reader cannot immediately discount the fantastic events it involves as improbable in the novel’s fi ctional world, since the fi ctional reality of the novel’s setting has not yet been clearly established. In effect, this fi rst chapter trains the reader to treat all the rest of the narrative with some caution.

In spite of the treacherous reality status of the narrative, however, it would be inaccurate to call Eiji an unreliable narrator precisely because the conceit of the interior monologue is that he is not narrating at all. He is just perceiving his reality, which includes his interaction with media and his fl ights of imagination . Furthermore, in the futuristic environment of contemporary Tokyo reality merges with media, real violence is hard to tell apart from the scenario of action movies or video games, and sci-ence fi ction becomes real. Eiji faithfully represents his experiences, but the reader struggles to keep the different planes of perception and their different reality status separate. Eiji may not be unreliable , but the narra-tive is. Surprisingly enough, number9dream is the only novel among all the examples of present-tense narration I discuss which explicitly employs the present tense in reference to contemporary media-saturated and fast- paced life. Its interior monologue serves to emphasise the importance of media consumption as part of contemporary reality by failing to differenti-ate clearly between perception of media, of dreams or of reality.

Apart from this, however, the choice of the present tense also has impli-cations for the novel’s Bildungsroman plot. While the novel can be read as

INTERIOR MONOLOGUE 57

the story of Eiji’s maturation, its present-tense narrative leaves the success of this process tantalisingly open . The typical fi rst-person Bildungsroman features a mature narrator looking back at a (usually male) younger self. The very existence of the narrator thereby confi rms the successful end of the process of maturation. The ending of number9dream , in contrast, potentially cuts Eiji off from all his tenuously established social ties, as everyone he knows may or may not have died in a major earthquake which reduces Tokyo to a pile of rubble. The ending escapes the conclusiveness of a past-tense perspective and opens up towards a new story. The ninth and fi nal chapter of the novel, then, is only a blank page: a space for the projection of the reader’s own dream number nine.

Emma Donoghue’s novel Room (2010) presents the unusual percep-tion of another young protagonist. Five-year-old Jack offers a strange view of his world through childish and innocent eyes. Once again, the proxim-ity to the narrator’s perspective in the interior monologue challenges the reader to question and reassess Jack’s perception of his life. Jack’s inno-cence and idiosyncrasies serve initially to conceal that what may sound funny and fantastically weird is in fact a horrifying reality. Objects, for example, are consistently personifi ed and capitalised in Jack’s narrative. At fi rst, this may seem to be the result of a child’s vivid imagination, but the reader is gradually made to realise that Jack and his mother have been locked into a room for all of his life. For Jack, therefore, objects only exist in the singular: Room, Wardrobe, Lamp, Bed. The horror of the situa-tion—Jack’s mother has been abducted as a teenager and kept a secret prisoner and object of sexual abuse for several years and Jack himself was born in the course of this time—impresses itself even more forcibly upon the reader because Jack completely fails to understand it. The interior monologue perspective provides the reader exclusively with Jack’s inter-pretation of things, leaving much to be inferred. The events of the story fi nally lead to the prisoners’ liberation and to Jack’s fi rst encounter with the outside world. The immediacy of the interior monologue strengthens the impact of this, for Jack, radically new experience. Since there is no gap between the narrating I and the experiencing I , between the moment of enunciation and the events of the story, but also no intervening narrative voice between the protagonist and the reader, the novel can develop its extended dramatic irony in which the reader shares the child’s perspective but always sees and understands more than the protagonist.

Once again, although the narrative perspective purports to present Jack’s interior monologue, this is not realised to the point where there

58 I. HUBER

would be a loss in narrativity . The evocation of the interior monologue allows Room to evade the paradox posed by simultaneous narration, aggravated in this case because Jack is unaware of any reality outside of Room and could therefore hardly even imagine an audience for his story. At the same time, Jack’s interior monologue is coherent even to the point of describing and explaining his perception of his surroundings. Similarly to number9dream , the novel therefore merely exchanges one deviance from a mimetic standard of representation with another. If Jack’s and Eiji’s interior monologues are not openly paradoxical so far as they do not address a non-existent narratee in an act of simultaneous narration, they are improbable as streams of consciousness in their own narrative coherence.

In principle, the same applies to the narrative voice of Graham Swift’s The Light of Day (2003). In this novel, however, the narrative coherence of the supposed interior monologue of the protagonist is justifi ed to a degree. George is a private investigator and is obviously in the habit of observing and reporting, not only the actions of others, but also of him-self. Furthermore, while he does not have an interlocutor per se, his inte-rior monologue is infl uenced by his relation to Sarah, whom he visits in prison and for whose benefi t he mentally takes notes of all his surround-ings in the outside world. Sarah, who is an English teacher, devolves upon George a heightened awareness of language (72). Therefore, while his narrative does appear to document his thoughts, they are always carefully articulated.

The novel’s present-tense plot covers one day, the 20th of November, from morning to evening, and is interspersed with George’s memories of the events which led to Sarah’s imprisonment two years previously. Structurally, this is very similar to a narrative deictic usage of the present tense, but there is no reference to an act of narration. George’s thoughts are for his own benefi t only, without an addressee. He spends the day reviewing and reliving the events of the 20th of November two years pre-viously. His memories are thus not an embedded narrative as such but rather dominate his thoughts throughout the day .

In both Room and number9dream the present tense abets the narrative voices of young protagonists, emphasising their youth and inexperience and avoiding the matured perspective implied in retrospective narration. In The Light of Day , in contrast, the protagonist fi nds himself in a moment of suspended time for the duration of Sarah’s sentence. He is torn between his vivid memories of the past , particularly everything that pertains to


Sarah’s case, and his hopes for the future , when his love for Sarah can be fulfi lled once she is set free. The two years since the murder Sarah was con-victed of and the eight or nine years until her sentence is fully served are suspended in a blurred moment of an irrelevant present , marked mainly by routine and longing. If in both Room and number9dream the present tense provides an immediate perspective on the narrative events which are crucial to the development of their protagonists, in The Light of Day , important events in the life of the protagonist happened in the past and are expected in the future . The events of the present moment of narra-tion, the 20th of November, are experienced only as realisations of an unchanging routine, which will only end with Sarah’s release. Rather than emphasising an immediacy of eventfulness, the present tense is used here to suggest suspension and iteration.

FIGURAL NARRATION Ali Smith is a novelist who generally likes to experiment in her novels with the possibilities opened by the use of different narrative tenses. She often mixes various types of tenses, and I will discuss two of her novels that do so in Chap. 7 . While it also combines various narrative tenses, her novel The Accidental (2006) provides an interesting example for a fi gural interior monologue type usage. The novel contains four different fi gural narrative voices, all belonging to members of the same family. Two of these four use the present tense. In addition, there are three brief fi rst- person interludes, highly associative celebrations of the cinema, which I will ignore for the present since they are descriptive and lyrical rather than narrative and do not directly relate to the novel’s plot. Irrespective of their tense usage, all four voices of the family members present a decidedly internal perspective, strongly focalised through the protagonists, portraying their thoughts. In fact, it is striking how little difference, in the end, the choice of tense makes in the reader’s proximity to the characters. Compare these two pas-sages, one from young Astrid’s narrative, the other from her stepfather Michael’s:

She now has nine dawns one after the other on the mini dv tape in her Sony digital. Thursday 10 July 2003, Friday 11 July 2003, Saturday 12, Sunday 13, Monday 14, Tuesday 15, Wednesday 16, Thursday 17 and today Friday 18. But it is hard to know what moment exactly dawn is. All there is when you look at it on the camera screen is the view of outside getting more vis-ible. So does this mean that the day begins as soon as you wake up and open

60 I. HUBER

http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56213-5_7

your eyes? […] Astrid kicks her trainers off on to the fl oor. She slides back across the horrible bed. Or possibly the beginning is even further back than that, when you are in the womb or whatever it’s called. (8)

If he were this wine glass there would be hairline cracks holding him together, running their live little electrical connections all over him. Oh. To be fi lled with goodness then shattered by goodness, so beautifully mosaically fragmented by such shocking goodness. Michael smiled. Eve thought he was smiling at her. She smiled back. He smiled at Astrid too. She gave him a mur-derous look and scraped a plate. Good for her! Obnoxious little creep. (58)

In both cases, narrative report merges with free direct or free indirect thought. The tense shift adds at most a minimal level of mediation to Michael’s narrative. The main difference lies not in a greater or lesser facility of thought representation, but in the ease with which narrative report and thought representation can be distinguished. In Michael’s sec-tion, they can be easily told apart: Free indirect thought in the fi rst sen-tence, free direct thought in the next two, then narrative report when they smile at each other and fi nally free direct thought once again in the last two exclamations. In Astrid’s narrative, however, it becomes hard to distinguish between narrative report and Astrid’s own thoughts. The fi rst sentence seems to be narrative report, but the list of days is already ambig-uous. Is this Astrid, clicking through the videos on her camera , or is this a very pedantic narrative report? The next sentences are clearly free direct thought representations. The ellipsis is followed by a sentence of narrative report. Discrimination becomes diffi cult once again in the next sentence, which starts as a narrative report, while the adjective ‘horrible’ implies Astrid’s perspective. In present-tense narration, narrative report and char-acter’s perspective are diffi cult to keep apart. The result of the tense shift is therefore not so much a difference in narrative distance, but rather implies a certain ceding of narrative control by letting the narrative voice merge to the point of indistinctiveness with that of the character.

While also strongly dominated by the thoughts of their refl ector fi gures, the narratives of Michael and of Eve (the children’s mother) at various points evince a very tight control of form. The fi rst part of Eve’s narra-tive is presented as an imaginary interview she conducts with herself, on the model of the fi ctional historical interviews on which she has built her career as an author. While portraying the thoughts plaguing her during a sleepless night, thought presentation is not direct, unmediated and asso-ciative as in Astrid’s and Magnus’s narrative, but deliberately structured and controlled. Meanwhile, the narrative of poetry professor Michael at


one point imitates poetic form: love sonnets, ballad and modernist free verse. The parents’ narratives are infused by their awareness of formal mediation and by their professional practice.

Narrative tense, and narrative form more generally, is thus used in The Accidental as a means to characterise its protagonists. Calculating the per-centage of her life lived in the new century, Astrid notes:

She herself is 25 per cent new, 75 per cent old. […] Magnus is 17ish per cent new, 83 per cent old. She is 8 per cent more in the new than Magnus. Her mother and Michael are way out there on a much much more signifi cantly small percentage in the new, a much much more signifi cantly large percent-age in the old. (11)

Astrid’s calculation roughly corresponds with the tense usage of the novel. The narratives of Michael and Eve emerge from their past experiences, and their experience of the present is always brought into context with their past. Meanwhile, Smith chooses the present tense deliberately for the two children of the family, Astrid and her brother Magnus. Even more so, as the one least burdened with memories Astrid’s part uses the present tense most consistently. Her brother Magnus is tormented by guilt about a recent misdeed with calamitous consequences, and much of his narrative is taken up by his past-tense memories . Just as the interview format and the verse arrangements serve as means to characterise Eve and Michael, the use of the tense in Astrid’s and Magnus’s narrative is appropriate both to their mental state and to the content of their narratives. Ali Smith thus insistently endeavours to make form correspond to content and uses nar-rative tense as one means to characterise her protagonists.

While Smith uses the present tense to approximate unmediated repre-sentation of a character’s present thoughts as they emerge, Smith’s style is a far cry from a stream of consciousness . The only recent author I have encountered who seriously attempts to reproduce thought processes is Will Self, in his novel Umbrella (2012). Self does so in explicit reference to modernist literature, whose inheritance he claims for his creative aspi-ration (see Self, ‘Modernism and Me’). Rather appropriately for a text that endeavours to reclaim modernist aesthetics for today’s literature, Umbrella ’s plot spans the roughly hundred years from 1918, the heydays of modernism, to the year 2010. To summarise it briefl y, young muni-tions worker Audrey Death falls ill with encephalitis lethargica in 1918, a psychological illness which cuts her off from normal interchange and lands

62 I. HUBER

her permanently in an asylum. Many years later, in 1971, Dr Zack Busner manages to briefl y heal her affl iction with a new drug. After a while, however, the drug fails and Audrey relapses into her closed mental state. In 2010, a retired Busner revisits the site of the asylum, now being developed into a high-end residential building, and dwells in memories . Finally, the novel also tells the story of Stanley, Audrey’s younger brother, who goes to fi ght in the Great War. All of these various plot-strands and chronological moments are presented in form of a relentless stream of con-sciousness , consisting of and mixing four different perspectives: Audrey’s, Stanley’s, and Busner’s, both in 1971 and in 2010.

In contrast to Ali Smith’s The Accidental , in which some pains are taken to distinguish the narrative voices of the individual characters, partly by means of the employment of narrative tense, in Umbrella one perspec-tive merges almost imperceptibly with the next, with changes in refl ector occurring usually within the same paragraph and sometimes even within the same sentence. The narrative thus jumps from one narrative perspec-tive and one chronological moment to the next, without warning and with little heed to chronology. At the same time, the basic narrative style—a discontinuous and associative stream of consciousness with frequent inser-tions of direct thought marked by italics, often in the form of references to popular songs—remains exactly the same for all the refl ectors. With its abrupt changes in narrative perspective the associative nature of the stream of consciousness thus extends from the representation of the characters’ thoughts to the narrative structure of the novel itself.

Among all the examples I discuss here, Umbrella is the only novel in which the way the present tense is used does curtail narrativity , plot and readability. The majority of the novels I discuss in this study show little concern with a mimetically conceivable narrative situation for their present-tense narration while nonetheless presenting realistic fi ctional scenarios . While they disregard realism on the level of discourse , they for the most part maintain it on the level of the story. The converse is true for Will Self ’s novel. While remaining fi gural, the novel’s discourse follows closely the thoughts of the protagonists with all their associative jumps, ellipses and interruptions—in the present tense, of course. This narrative technique, however, makes it diffi cult for the reader to follow narrative events, to put them into a chronological order or even to fi g-ure out whether they happen or not. The following passage, describing Stanley’s furtive sexual encounter with a housemaid, may serve as an example:


The housemaid accommodates her body to his, nesting in, relaxing, going … all at once limp. Jack Johnson KO’ed in the 26h round —there is no articula-tion to her limbs any more—all the tendon strings have been cut. Her tongue slops on his lip, and as he tastes, then gags, on the saltsplash of her blood he hears the unmistakable sound whip-cracked-into-suet: a head-shot echoing around the fl inty trench . Her forehead and one eye are gone, her mob cap lies on the earthen pellets between the thorny stems of the roses, escaping from its tripe trills are hanks of her khaki hair, beneath which is the stewed fruit of her brains. Stanley lowers her down to the ground gently, swaddled, she is—in death. —I propose this, says the skull-head they all call Bertie, that when boys have attained the age of eighteen they should be sorted into three categories—quite arbitrarily … He speaks like this: in perfectly ordered sentences , the words marching out from his bony hole in single fi le … (199; original emphases and ellipses)

It remains entirely unclear from this passage and from its immediate con-text whether Stanley’s encounter with the housemaid is real or a dream , whether her death is a hallucination, and in what temporal and ontological relation it stands to the subsequently ensuing conversation which never refers to the incidence again. Only a few pages later, the housemaid is res-urrected, exposing the scene as Stanley’s imagination . A few pages fur-ther on again, readers become aware that the whole episode seems to be conjured up by Audrey. The ontological status of Stanley’s narrative thus remains constantly in question. Only towards the end of the novel is it sug-gested that Stanley has died in the war and that his entire story-line may be Audrey’s invention, who comforts herself with imagining Stanley’s survival.

With Busner’s thoughts and perceptions in 2010 merging with those of the much younger Busner of 1971, with Audrey’s perception of her life in 1918 merging with her dreams about Stanley, and with hardly any stylistic or other marking of the transitions, Umbrella sets the reader a signifi -cant challenge. This merging of different temporal moments and differ-ent perspectives into a single present, irrespective of chronological order and distance is not only inspired by a modernist aesthetic of opaqueness, however. It also fi nds its echo in a central topic of the novel, that of the changed time perception in madness. Realising that one of the symptoms he observes in his patients is an acceleration or deceleration of movement, Busner notes: ‘Time […] it has to do with time. The psychotics, for all their extravagant claims of having been sent sliding back down the shiny curve from the future to warn us of the Victory of the Machines , are rooted in Now’ (42; original emphasis). Thus one of the patients who Busner is

64 I. HUBER

briefl y able to resurrect with his drug ‘told the psychiatrist he had expe-rienced [his more than forty years of illness] as a continuous present, an awful and unchanging Now ’ (235; original emphasis).

Considering the whole novel, however, Busner himself seems to suf-fer from this affl iction no less than his patient Audrey. Indeed, since the narrative style remains the same throughout and the ‘pop ditties that had infested [Busner’s] mind’ (396) reappear constantly throughout the dif-ferent narrative perspectives, Busner himself might be seen to be the one who conjures up both his own and his version of Audrey’s past into the present . The constant associative shifts between narrative perspectives and temporal moments would then in the end amount not so much to the perpetual present of madness, but to the workings of memory in Busner’s own endeavour to face his guilt. Self ’s consistent use of a present tense stream of consciousness therefore both presents a challenge to the reader’s understanding and opens the novel’s narrative structure to interpretation, leaving the precise relation of the individual narrative perspectives to each other tantalisingly ambiguous.

AUTHORIAL NARRATION There is an obvious contradiction in talking about authorial interior monologues, but even in the case of authorial narration, the choice of the present tense may be guided by an emphasis on the interior, subjec-tive perspective of characters. Neel Mukherjee’s harrowing family saga The Lives of Others (2014), for example, once again combines different narra-tive perspectives: one part of the novel consists of letters and diary entries of one member of the Gosh family, who becomes a partisan in the commu-nist struggle in India in the 1960s. Other chapters cover the family history , and others again depict the power relations and tensions within the family in the four years 1967–1970. The letters present an interpolated narra-tion, in which events are recorded in close proximity to their occurrence while the narrative perspective in the chapters about the family’s history recalls that of a historian: a traditional omniscient perspective in the past tense . The chapters that delve into the family’s relations and power struc-tures, however, are narrated in the present tense. Narration in these chap-ters is insistently focalised through the eyes of the various family members, with a high amount of free direct as well as free indirect discourse. While the voice of the narrator is clearly apparent in the historical chapters, in the present-tense chapters it recedes almost entirely behind the protagonists’


perspective. In contrast to the other chapters, whose temporal relation to each other is established by the narrative voice, for the present-tense chap-ters even this chronological context is supplied in the paratext, by chapter headings. Rather than to comment on the intricate loyalties, affections and dislikes that rock the family, this choice of narrative perspective lets them emerge gradually through the thoughts and actions of the characters and challenges the reader to make sense of the power struggles at play. While the historical chapters include narrative commentary and prolepsis, in the present-tense chapters the narrator refrains from judgement and retrospective knowledge, presenting his characters’ thoughts and actions largely unmediated. As in The Accidental , the line between narrative voice and character’s perspective is often unclear, while judgement is deferred entirely to the reader.

Meanwhile, this use of the present tense to maintain a strong focus on the interior perspective of the characters stands in further contrast to the use of present tense in both the prologue and the epilogue to the novel. In these cases, the narrative does not present us primarily with characters’ thoughts, but with the account of two crimes, born of desperation and pain: a father’s decision to kill his family and himself in the face of utterly hopeless poverty and a young girl’s orchestration of a terrorist attack. In this case, instead of tracing the protagonists’ thoughts, the narrative voice provides a dry account of the circumstances and the background of the crimes. These two stories are not directly related to the novel’s main plot and the present tense bestows upon them a generic quality, as typical in all their horror. Once again, the narrator refrains from judgement and readers are left to draw their own conclusions.

CONCLUDING REMARKS In spite of the prevailing infl uence of modernism that scholars like Adiseshiah and Hildyard identify in contemporary literature (5), con-temporary present-tense usage for the most part stylistically distances itself from the more radical and anti- narrative tendencies of modernism. Comparatively few of the novels I have studied can be read as interior monologues at all, and the majority of those favour narrativity and coher-ence over the free association and fragmentation of the stream of con-sciousness . Thus, contemporary novels seek to profi t from the immediacy of the interior monologue without concessions to the formlessness such an immediacy would imply.

66 I. HUBER

For the most part, the interior monologue seems to serve the novels I have discussed as a convenient way to soften the paradox of their present- tense narrations and to give the reader direct insight into a character’s thoughts and perspective. In particular, the present tense seems attractive for the depiction of characters who are for some reason or other caught in the moment: either because they are young , like Eiji, Jack, or Astrid and Magnus, and their youthful , immature perspective is presented without any retrospective maturer judgement ; or because they fi nd themselves in a moment of suspended time, like George or Busner’s patients. The present tense of the interior monologue thus serves partly to characterise the pro-tagonists, partly to develop plot structures without hindsight and without narrative distance. For readers, this is often somewhat disorienting, since they have to unravel different levels of discourse , perception and reality. Both in Umbrella and in number9dream this results in an uncertainty con-cerning the ontological status of what is narrated. In Room , the reality of Jack’s situation emerges only gradually. And in both The Accidental and The Lives of Others the diffi culty lies in differentiating the voice of the nar-rator from the perspective of the characters. The challenge for the reader is both to manage the ambiguities of the perspective and to come to some sort of judgement or assessment of the characters’ thoughts and actions; a judgement which is not already provided by a retrospective narrative perspective.



CHAPTER 6

Abstract In this chapter the focus lies on present-tense narrations in which narration and narrative develop simultaneously. There are differ-ent ways to deal with the basic impossibility of such a narrative situation. This impossibility is sometimes directly addressed but often simply glossed over, where the conditions of the narrative situation are never clarifi ed. In such cases the choice of the present tense is often motivated by thematic, symbolic or rhetoric reasons, without making allowances for a realistic narrative situation. Among the examples considered here are Jim Crace’s Harvest , Anna Smaill’s The Chimes , Hilary Mantel’s Tudor novels and John Banville’s The Infi nites .

Keywords present-tense narration • simultaneous narration • concur-rent narration • current report

So far I have discussed contemporary variants of the classical usage of the present tense as retrospective and narrative deictic and addressed the use of the present tense in the form of extended interior monologues . Throughout I have argued that contemporary usage tends to explore the possibility of the present tense as a tense of narration proper, and that the present tense calls for a careful decoding of the respective narrative situation. To a greater or lesser extent, however, all these forms evade the logical impossibility of present-tense narration. Turning to simultane-ous narration, that is, the co-instantaneous development of narration and

Simultaneous Narration

narrated events, this chapter takes a closer look at works which directly engage with the basic conundrum of present-tense narration: namely that it is impossible to experience and narrate at the same time.

In fi rst- person narration this impossibility concerns the lack of time in which narration could happen (e.g. I cannot speak and report my speech- act at the same time). Such concurrent narration is only mimetically con-ceivable in form of a current report (like a live sports commentary) or as an interior monologue . As Fludernik points out, the former is not ‘real’ narrative but merely reports events as they are registered by the senses ( Natural Narratology 252). While German and French (post)modernists in particular have experimented with this mode, contemporary literature shows little affi nities to such basically non- narrative or even programmati-cally anti-narrative usages of the present tense. The interior monologue, which is not addressed to an audience but evolves in the mind of the protagonist(s), presents a special case which I have discussed separately in the previous chapter.

In the case of fi gural and authorial narration, in which the narrator per defi nition takes no part in the events unfolding in the narrative, the impos-sibility of simultaneous narration lies in the lack of a location from which to narrate. The narrator coincides with the action in time but not in space. The controlling and commenting function of narrative hindsight is evaded and the narrative voice does not ground its authority in the discourse of history .

Contemporary simultaneous narration fi nds different ways to deal with its temporal impossibility, variously obfuscating, ignoring or fl aunting it. All the examples in this chapter thus feature impossible narrative situations which clearly address their narration to someone, but do not allow for a temporal or spatial location in which this act of narration can be realisti-cally imagined to take place .

FIRST-PERSON NARRATION In 1990, Monika Fludernik observed that the ‘narrative present occurs most frequently in refl ector -mode novels’ ( Natural Narratology 251). In contemporary fi ction, in contrast, simultaneous fi rst-person narration is notably more frequent. As the most strikingly paradoxical of present-tense usages, simultaneous fi rst-person narration has also received the most critical attention, in particular since J. M. Coetzee has employed it so infl uentially in his work. Simultaneous fi rst-person narration cannot be made to conform to a mimetic standard of past narration by either

70 I. HUBER

of the two possible resolutions suggested by Dorrit Cohn and discussed in previous chapters of this study: the ‘ historical present resolution’ or retrospective narration, which denies the simultaneity of narration; or the ‘ interior monologue resolution’, which denies that it is genuine narra-tion (Cohn 102). Beyond eschewing the mimetic standard of past nar-ration, breaking out of what Cohn calls the ‘ autobiographical matrix’ (105), simultaneous fi rst-person narration also calls into question some basic narratological differentiations. In retrospective fi rst-person narration the difference between the narrating I and the experiencing I is of cen-tral importance. The subject of enunciation, looking back at an earlier self, always knows more than the subject of experience. The I is split into two subject positions which never coincide and which the reader is chal-lenged to disentangle. In the case of simultaneous narration, however, these two subject positions coincide. Moreover, Genette ’s categories of the extradiegetic and intradiegetic narrator threaten to collapse into each other, since in simultaneous fi rst-person narration there is strictly speaking no extradiegetic narrative position. The act of narration coincides with the development of the story and thus unfolds on the level of diegesis. At the same time, no clear setting of narration (that is, no temporal and spatial location and no addressee) ever materialises.

Rather than to eschew the indeterminability of the narrative situation in fi rst-person simultaneous narration, contemporary fi ction frequently turns it into an advantage. Jim Crace’s historical novel Harvest (2013), for example, offers an instance of fairly complex simultaneous narration which leaves the exact position from which the story is narrated tantalis-ingly vague. Set in a remote rural village in sixteenth-century Britain, its narrator, Walter Thirsk, chronicles the events of seven cataclysmic days, in which the community crumbles and breaks apart due to a tragically escalat-ing sequence of events. This historical setting, however, is nowhere made explicit, but has to be fi gured out by the reader based on Walter’s descrip-tions. The novel seems to attempt to evade historical hindsight both on the level of the historical distance of the reader and on the level of Walter’s own perspective on the narrated events. Walter’s narration is repeatedly explic-itly marked as simultaneous by temporal deictic markers like ‘now’, ‘this moment’, ‘today’, ‘tonight’, while greater time-lapses often fall between the chapters, but are always carefully identifi ed. There are longer past- tense sections occasionally, in which Walter narrates his own past, or repeats what others have told him. The second chapter, for example, gives mainly a past-tense account of events which Walter did not witness himself.

SIMULTANEOUS NARRATION 71

The turn of events surprises Walter at every point. There is no hind-sight, hinting at a retrospective use of the present tense, no judgement on the events or acts of the moment from a later perspective. Thus, for example, one of the series of misfortunes which lead to the destruction of the community is the death of one of two strangers, whom the vil-lagers falsely blame for a fi re in the manor house. The two strangers are condemned to stay for seven days fastened to the village’s pillory, but the older one of the two, being fairly short and rather weak, ends up being strangled by the pillory. Walter notices the old man’s distress and sets out to fi nd him a prop to stand on, but misjudging the severity of the case and fi nding nothing convenient at hand, he refrains from helping. No one knows yet of the old man’s death, when Master Kent, the owner of the manor house later complains to Walter that he was verbally attacked by the younger one of the two strangers and called a murderer when riding past the pillory. Walter’s reaction at this stage of the narrative lacks any hint of retrospective knowledge about the real state of affairs: ‘It’s just as well, I suppose, that I haven’t yet succeeded in alleviating the short one’s pun-ishment by dragging up a log or stone for him to stand on. The men are proving insolent’ (70). The consistent usage of the present tense allows readers insight into Walter’s thoughts as the events unfold, without any implied foreknowledge of what is to come. All judgements Walter offers are therefore provisional and are indeed often revised later on.

There is a confessional quality to the narrative, but this is a confession for which there is no confessor. Walter’s voice is clearly a narrative voice and not a stream of consciousness . Neither does he seem to be address-ing himself, in a sort of extended soliloquy, but rather someone who is a stranger to the village and its life, someone who is not implicated in any way in the events that unfold. His narration is careful to explain, give reasons for, describe and, above all, justify the village’s way of life and his own and the villagers’ actions. Nevertheless, there is no one this narra-tive could be addressed to and no moment in the unfolding of the events in which it could be narrated. An addressee of this story could only be imagined as a retrospective one, someone Walter speaks to after his depar-ture from the village in the end, but at the same time, the simultaneity of the narration is constantly insisted upon. Due to these contradictions, no conceivable real- life communicative situation ever emerges from the text. While the setting of the narrative is ‘realistic’ and historical , the setting of the narration is unimaginable. Such a use of the present tense can there-fore serve to call on the authenticity of an immediate eye-witness report

72 I. HUBER

at the same time as it heightens awareness of the construction of the text as a work of fi ction.

However, there are also clear limits to simultaneous narration and the scene mentioned above offers a good example. Although Walter, osten-sibly, does not suspect the old man’s death yet, an attentive reader most likely would. After all, an earlier passage describes in quite some detail Walter’s well-meant but half-hearted attempts to help the old man. The mere choice of narrative information given to the reader already hints at a retrospective vision, because only the end can convey meaning on the contingency of events by creating a causal structure. As Frank Kermode puts it when discussing the necessary logic of a ‘tock’ following a ‘tick’: ‘All such plotting presupposes and requires that an end will bestow upon the whole duration and meaning’ (46). The narrator can only know what to narrate if he or she knows where the story is heading. Thus, ‘all that seems fortuitous and contingent in what follows is in fact reversed for a later benefaction of signifi cance in some concordant structure’ ( Kermode 148). True simultaneous narration would have to be truly contingent and would therefore no longer be able to constitute a narrative at all.

In view of such diffi culties, what are the further aesthetic advantages of the use of a narrative present tense for the novel? There is no single answer, since Crace uses the present tense to create a number of intriguing effects. First, the lack of a retrospective narrative assessment of the situa-tion allows the novel to withhold judgement , while the reader is implicitly asked to weigh the moral implications of the characters’ actions and to contemplate their consequences. Second, the use of the present tense adds to the oral quality of the narrative voice and fi ts the voice of the illiterate Walter well. Thirdly, the consistent use of the present tense allows for a fl uent shift between a narrative and an iterative use of the present tense. Passages like the following stress the continuity and changelessness of the rural way of life we are presented with:

Reap and gossip. That’s the rule. On harvest days, anyone who’s got a pair of legs and arms can expect to earn supper with unceasing labour. […] Compared to winter days, let’s say, or digging days, it’s satisfying work, made all the more so by the company we keep, for on such days all the faces we know and love […] are gathered in one space and bounded by common ditches and collective hopes. If, perhaps, we hear a barking deer nagging to be trapped and stewed, or a woodcock begging to make his hearse in a pie, we lift our heads as one and look towards the woods as one; we straighten up as one and stare at the sun, reprovingly, if it’s been darkened by a cloud;


our scythes and hand tools clack and chat in unison. And anything we say is heard by everyone. (6–7)

The sense in which the present tense is used here is very much that which Fleischman describes as the ‘ atemporality’ of the present tense, which ‘makes it possible to detach events from a particular historical moment and endow them with a sense of timelessness’ (58). Walter’s frequent use of the plural pronouns ‘we’ and ‘us’ serves to further emphasise the com-munal experience of continuity and unchanging tradition over and against an individual experience of change. The narrative events eventually erupt into this community of ‘slow-paced common wealth of habit, custom and routine. Of wasting time and sauntering, of indolence’ (122). They introduce change, and with this the very possibility to perceive tempo-ral progression. As a narrative which charts the fi rst intrusions of indus-trial progress into a rural society based on rhythms of unchanging cyclical return, Harvest uses present-tense narration to imagine a point of view from which the retrospective awareness of change marking a past-tense narrative is still hardly thinkable. The use of the present tense to tell a story of radical change, destruction and the disappearance of a way of life allows for a perspective that largely avoids nostalgia. Even at the end, when Walter is the last one to leave the village, the view of the past is obstructed: ‘It’s time. I have to fi nish my farewells—though actually there’s not much of a view. From here, the prospects are hemmed in and limited […]. If anything, the views ahead, beyond our bounds, are more rewarding to the eye’ (272). Alone, cut off from the community and the way of life which secured his place in a timeless time, Walter enters a time that is not oriented towards the past , but to the future . But even this future is not imagined as the open future of individualised progressive time: ‘I have to carry on alone until I reach wherever is awaiting me, until I gain wherever is awaiting us’ (273). The future is already present, waiting, and not only for Walter alone. Even entirely on his own, having lost all ties to his home and to others, he can only think of himself as part of a community. Crace thus uses present-tense narration in Harvest in the attempt to imagine a narrative voice and perspective whose conception of time signifi cantly differs from that of Western societies today. Thus, the novel tells not only a story of the destruction of a village and a way of life, but also traces a change in the perception of time itself. Present-tense narration in Harvest thus has the paradoxical effect of creating immediacy and of marking dif-ference at the same time.

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Simultaneous narration follows a different rationale in Anna Smaill’s dystopian novel The Chimes (2015). In Harvest , simultaneous narration works on the level of discourse to withhold the narrator’s judgement and to allow for a gradual development of events in which tension arises from an advantage in knowledge on the part of the reader. In The Chimes , in contrast, the use of the present tense is justifi ed on the level of content. In the dystopian world the novel portrays, memory is brittle and few people are able to remember more than a couple of days of the past . They live in a perpetual present where past-tense narration is impossible. Even those few memories that are rescued are not remembered but relived, in vivid visions which make them present. Only once the narrator-protagonist Simon has trained himself to retain the memory of prior days does the narrative tense shift occasionally and briefl y into the past tense . Simon’s task in the quest to destroy the instrument which steals people’s knowledge of the past is precisely to recover memories and to retrospectively construct a story from them. While the use of the present tense is therefore highly appropri-ate to the story, there is also a critique implied, as it is the direct result of a severe limitation of human existence and Simon struggles hard to fi ght it and to recover a sense of the past .

Not all fi rst-person simultaneous narration is as effective and as central to a novel’s aesthetics as in Harvest or The Chimes , but in most cases there is some sort of structural or thematic justifi cation. In David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks (2014), for example, with its numerous different fi rst-person narrators, all of whom use simultaneous narration, the choice of narrative perspective does not strike me as essential, either structurally or thematically. It could be argued, however, that in a novel which is narrated by different voices over a time-span of some 60 years, a simultaneous point of view has a certain logic to it, as it is diffi cult to imagine a coherent retrospective point of view from which the events could be narrated, particularly since one of the narrators dies at the end of his part. Clare Morrall’s Astonishing Splashes of Colour (2003), conversely, offers some tentative thematic justifi cation, in that the protagonist has lost both her mother and her child and therefore believes she has neither a past nor a future and is condemned ‘to live in that pinprick of time that is now’ (310). In DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little (2003), the present tense helps to sustain the narrative tension when the narrator is condemned to death, since no retrospective viewpoint imme-diately suggests that the sentence is not carried out. Furthermore, here as elsewhere, the present tense helps to sustain an emphatically youthful nar-rative voice without an element of mature, critical retrospection.


FIGURAL NARRATION Contrary to Fludernik ’s assertion that they are the most frequent, I have encountered relatively few examples of fi gural simultaneous narration. The work of both Fludernik and Casparis would lead one to expect in par-ticular non- sequitur novels in this category. Alison Moore’s The Lighthouse (2012) is a good example for such a usage of simultaneous fi gural narra-tion. Her protagonists are isolated, lonely and aimless people, acting ad hoc, without any larger plan and with few future prospects. While the novel provides information about the characters’ pasts, there is little refl ec-tion on those pasts or their present from the characters’ sides. Ester is stuck in her unsatisfying marriage with a violent husband and even her affairs have become acts of routine. The walking holiday that Futh undertakes to escape from the ruins of his own marriage amounts to a series of sponta-neous decisions, botched plans and misfortunes, while he fails entirely to refl ect critically on his past and present actions. Communication between characters is rare and often impaired and the ending of the novel is left open . Throughout, the present tense is appropriate to the characters’ avoidance of critical judgement and their general passivity.

The non- sequitur novel is, however, not the only viable option for fi gural simultaneous narration. Hilary Mantel’s Tudor novels Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring up the Bodies (2012) serve well to illustrate that there are other possibilities. The narrative perspective in these novels, especially in Wolf Hall , has raised comments for its intriguing, and to some readers irritating, adoption of a fi gural narration with a strong refl ector which sel-dom even allows for enough distance to speak of ‘Cromwell’, and usually refers to the protagonist simply as ‘he’. In comparison, Mantel’s decision to use the present tense in her historical novels has received much less attention. In an article for the Guardian , Mantel herself describes the conception of this narrative perspective in the following terms:

The basic decision about the book was taken seconds before I began writ-ing. ‘So now get up’: the person on the ground was Cromwell and the camera was behind his eyes.

The events were happening now, in the present moment, and what fol-lowed would be fi ltered through the main character’s sensibility. He seemed to be occupying the same physical space as me, with a slight ghostly overlap. (‘How I Came to Write Wolf Hall ’)

The rationale Mantel indicates here is a visual one, implying an inspiration from fi lm or photography , from the immediacy and presence of the visual

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experience. The present tense would thus evoke the (real or illusory) co- presence of performance and audience, either on fi lm or on stage . This association seems to be confi rmed, as both novels feature lists of characters reminiscent of those usually added to plays. Moreover, the epigraphs to Wolf Hall both refer to the theatre: the fi rst by Vitruvius about different theatrical settings, the second a list of the characters of a morality play dat-ing from the late fi fteenth century.

One would expect such a narrative perspective to favour mimesis over diegesis, showing over telling, and thus to privilege dialogue , external visual appearance and action. This, however, is decisively not what these two novels do. The narrative perspective is not an external, objective one, but rather emphatically subjective. If it can be compared to a camera , this camera is indeed situated behind Cromwell’s eyes and only records what he notices. Throughout the novels, there are strikingly few descrip-tive passages, presenting the settings, the landscape, or even the exterior appearance of the characters. In fact, the novels include very little visual information. Exceptions are always motivated by the interests of Cromwell himself; for example, his attention to the cardinal’s clothes because he used to work with cloth merchants. Instead of the view of an objective camera , the perspective is a decidedly partial one.

While Cromwell is the refl ector of the fi gural narrative, in Genette ’s terms the focalisation of this narrative cannot be defi ned as either clearly internal or clearly external. It is internal insofar as we are exclusively pre-sented with Cromwell’s point of view; it is external insofar as Cromwell’s thoughts, motives, emotions and even his past remain largely hidden from the reader in spite of the fact that the narrative perspective repeatedly merges entirely with that of the protagonist. The following passage offers an illustrative example:

Gregory is coming up thirteen. He’s at Cambridge, with his tutor. He’s sent his nephews, his sister Bet’s sons, to school with him; it’s something he is glad to do for the family. […] Gregory has little interest in his books so far, though he likes to be told stories, dragon stories, stories of green people who live in the woods; you can drag him squealing through a passage of Latin if you persuade him that over the page there’s a sea serpent or a ghost . He likes to be in the woods and fi elds and he likes to hunt. He has plenty of growing to do, and we hope he will grow tall. (36)

This passage serves well to illustrate both the diffi culties posed by Mantel’s ambiguous use of the personal pronoun—which in this case


refers alternately to Cromwell or to his son—and to show how the nar-rative perspective surreptitiously shifts from a fi gural to a fi rst- person narrative. Initially we seem to encounter a detached narrative perspec-tive, which mainly states facts. As we proceed, however, we are drawn into Cromwell’s own perspective, or rather his own narrative. Notably, the free indirect discourse of the later part of the passage does not pres-ent Cromwell’s thoughts, as would be usual for a fi gural narrative, but rather has a conversational quality, as if Cromwell himself were telling us about his son. This gradual slippage of perspective from narrative voice to character voice eventually culminates in the fi rst- person plural of the last subclause. Notwithstanding that the passage thus presents us clearly with Cromwell’s perspective, it allows little insight into his thoughts about his son—whether, say, he worries about his lack of education, or whether he approves of his love for stories. Once again, the narrative situation con-structs the reader not so much as a voyeur with insight into the character’s thoughts, but as Cromwell’s interlocutor, the confi dante whom he is lack-ing on the level of the story.

In its close proximity to Cromwell, the narrative perspective foregoes any historical distance. It positions itself as contemporary with Cromwell, quite explicitly so in the second chapter of the novel’s second part, which offers ‘An Occult History of Britain. 1521–1529’. While at fi rst sight the narrative appears to detach itself from Cromwell for the fi rst time at this point as the chapter recounts British national legends and history, it soon becomes clear that the perspective is that of Cromwell himself:

Prince Arthur of England […] was born in the year 1486, eldest son of Henry, the fi rst Tudor king. This Arthur married Katherine the princess of Aragon, died at fi fteen and was buried in Worcester Cathedral. If he were alive now, he would be King of England. His younger brother Henry would likely be Archbishop of Canterbury, and would not (at least we devoutly hope not) be in pursuit of a woman of whom the cardinal hears nothing good: a woman to whom, several years before the dukes walk in to despoil him, he will need to turn his attention; whose history , before ruin seizes him, he will need to comprehend. (66)

The narrative perspective is clearly not a modern one but is contempo-rary with the novel’s characters and plot. Nonetheless, it is diffi cult to pin down precisely what time the ‘now’ in this passage is referring to. Either it refers to the time before the cardinal’s downfall, that is, 1521 (as indicated by the use of the present tense later in the sentence), or to

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the year 1529 to which the previous chapters have taken the narrative, while his downfall is already in progress (as suggested by the awareness of the cardinal’s future ). The rest of the chapter, which covers the span of years between, is consistently narrated in the present tense as well, in spite of the chapter’s apparent status as an explicative analepsis. The use of the present tense thus shifts imperceptibly from simultaneous to retrospec-tive and the temporal relation of events always has to be reconstructed by the reader. Even while the narrative, like its protagonist, is obsessed with causes and effects, the almost consistent use of the present tense resists causality, forcing readers to keep track of causal sequence themselves.

This choice of narrative perspective is highly intriguing for historical novels whose protagonist is a well-known historical fi gure. Cromwell is both central to the narrative and remains opaque to the reader, who is confronted with a clearly subjective representation, but gains only a very limited insight into the mind of the narrative’s refl ector . This ‘ghostly overlap’, as Mantel aptly calls it, poses a constant challenge to readers to evaluate both the narrative’s representation and the historical knowledge they might bring to the text. At the same time, it enables Mantel to tell the story of Cromwell’s success without his fi nal downfall looming constantly on the horizon.

A strikingly different way of employing a fi gural simultaneous present tense can be found in A. L. Kennedy’s novel The Blue Book (2011). This novel combines sections in second- person narration in which the book itself addresses its reader , with the story of a sea cruise narrated from the fi gural point of view of Elizabeth. Initially, the second- person narration might seem to be addressed to a generic reader, but gradually it becomes clear that the ‘you’ that is addressed here is a specifi c person, a character in the story, namely Elizabeth’s lover Adam. In point of fact, at the end of the novel, Elizabeth hands the very book that readers hold in their hands to Adam, unable to confess to him directly the secret she has kept from him for many years: that she had a child by him, but that the child died.

Simultaneous narration is, in this case, not only a formal feature of the discourse but a central twist of the story. At the same time, it pres-ents a striking logical impossibility. The book traces Elizabeth’s men-tal and emotional development from the moment she boards the ship with her boyfriend Derek, through her struggle to resist the resurg-ing of her love for Adam, to her decision to leave Derek and return to Adam, to whom she fi nally, at the end of the cruise, hands the blue book. While the second- person passages emphasise that the entire novel has to


be considered to be that very same blue book, at the beginning of the story Elizabeth has not yet decided to return to Adam. Neither can the present tense used in the novel be considered to be retrospective , though, since the story leaves no possible time for Elizabeth to actually write it. The simultaneous act of narration takes the story to and beyond the point at which the book is given to Adam.

One might dismiss this as a fl aw in the narrative setup. It is so central to both the story and the way it is told, however, that to do so would invali-date the whole aesthetic project of the novel. I would rather like to point out with how much nonchalance a logical and possible narrative situation is sacrifi ced here in order to tell a striking story and to allow for the melo-dramatic revelation at its end. The novel poses its questions about love, truth, guilt and moral responsibilities no less urgently, and with no fewer claims to mimetic realism . These claims merely do not extend towards the narrative situation. Mimetic truth claims are made for the story but not for the discourse .

AUTHORIAL NARRATION Authorial simultaneous narration is least ‘outrageous’ since its typically omniscient point of view is in itself already mimetically speaking impos-sible (see Alber 88–102) . While classical authorial narration maintaining the past tense frequently appropriates historical discourse, even classical nineteenth-century realism often evokes the reader as an observer of a scene which develops contemporaneously before the reader’s eyes. From such an emphasis on the visual unfolding of a scene before the inner eye of the reader it is only a very short step to simultaneous narration. The following passage from Anthony Trollope’s The Warden serves well to illustrate the frequent contradiction between an evocation of a co-present sight and the narrative past tense :

The reader must now be requested to visit the rectory of Plumstead Episcopi; and as it is as yet still early morning, to ascend again with us into the bed-room of the archdeacon. The mistress of the mansion was at her toilet; on which we will not dwell with profane eyes, but proceed into a small inner room, where the doctor dressed and kept his boots and sermons; and here we will take our stand, premising that the door of the room was so open as to admit of a conversation between our reverend Adam and his valued Eve.

‘It’s all your own fault, archdeacon,’ said the latter. (96)

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Nowadays, the present tense may even seem to be the more obvious choice for such a narrative perspective. The use of the present tense for simultane-ous omniscient narration is therefore usually not particularly conspicuous and causes little problems for interpretation.

The way in which a novel like David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010) uses simultaneous narration therefore calls little attention to itself. Even though this is a historical novel , set in Japan at the turn of the nineteenth century, the use of the present tense has remark-ably little effect on the overall development of the narrative perspective. The present tense does repeatedly position readers in medias res , requiring them to fi nd their bearings again at the beginning of new subchapters, but the omniscience of the narrative perspective is nowhere restricted. The reader is granted insight into the minds of a number of characters, allowed to follow several interwoven plot-strands and given a full picture of devel-opments. All loose threads are tied up in the end to provide a tidy solution in which the bad are punished and confl icts are resolved. Apart from its use of the present tense, Mitchell’s novel thus presents a thoroughly con-ventional narrative setup, even to the point that its ending provides a brief summary of the remainder of the protagonist’s life in a manner typical for novels of the nineteenth century .

Authorial narration in Nicola Barker’s The Yips (2012) is slightly less conventional in that it emphasises more strongly an external view-point. In its extended dialogues and descriptions of action it seems to imitate the style of a screenplay. Sentences frequently feature parentheses offering stage directions, additional circumstantial descriptions or back-ground information on the characters. The narrative explicitly provides a visual perspective and even occasionally implies a limited camera - or stage-perspective:

Behind them—and over the continuing commotion from beyond the win-dow—another conversation suddenly becomes audible. ‘Ricker,’ a woman is saying, ‘Mr Ricker.’ ‘Did you enquire at the front desk?’ (Gene’s voice, getting louder.) ‘I went to desk,’ the woman replies, in halting English, ‘but there is nobody …’ ‘Did you ring the bell?’ ‘She say he will meet in bar. Mr Ricker.’ ‘Well, the bar’s almost shut now. It’s very late …’ (They enter the bar.) (65)


A stationary point of view is implied here, with off-stage sound advancing on the scene. In such scenes the novel mimics the aesthetics of dramatic texts, in which the usage of present tense is conventional, but which are usually not strictly speaking narrative. Nevertheless, the essentially non- narrative present tense of stage directions is here extended into a narrative proper as they go beyond descriptions and instructions to include com-ments on characters’ emotions and thoughts:

‘I’ll grant you that,’ Ransom concurs with a sage nod (informing Jen of his need for another drink with an imperiously raised fi nger). ‘They’ve got much fuller tits than the Japanese.’

Gene draws back, dismayed, uncertain whether Ransom is joking or not. Ransom collapses forward on to the bar, shaking his head (apparently expe-riencing this same problem, fi rst-hand), ‘ Fuuuuck ,’ he groans, ‘I honestly can’t believe I just said that.’

Gene […] stands up and goes to fetch Ransom the drink himself (thereby symbolically re-emphasizing the wide emotional, intellectual and psycho-logical distance between them by dint of the happy barrier that is the bar). (4–5; original italics)

While reminiscent of a screenplay, the narrative voice here goes way beyond depersonalised stage directions and current report . Additional details about characters’ actions are given, but, in the true fashion of an authorial narrator, both actions and thoughts of the characters are also commented on and interpreted. The dialogue of the characters is comple-mented by the often wry comments of the narrator, offering a patchwork of voices of which the narrator’s is a conspicuous part. The novel thus presents a kind of stylistic hybrid between a screenplay, in which a nar-rative position is typically missing, and an omniscient authorial narration with an overt narrator.

John Banville’s The Infi nities (2009) offers another intriguing example of an overt omniscient simultaneous narrator. Banville’s novel plays with the conventions of authorial narration by introducing a literally omniscient narrator: the god Hermes. As a god, Hermes not only has insight into the minds of the characters, he is also, to a certain extent, in control of time. Thus he tells us that he has delayed dawn for an hour in order to allow his father enough time for a romantic dalliance with one of the charac-ters. However, Hermes’s power and insight are limited. While interfering sometimes with the events of the story, Hermes is mainly an observer and he repeatedly proclaims himself surprised by developments. While much

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less reminiscent of dramatic texts than Barker’s novel , once again The Infi nities invites readers to witness events as they unfold, repeatedly urg-ing them to ‘look’ (e.g. 188, 295) . However, as a simultaneous observer Hermes’s omniscience does not extend to the future . Furthermore, his viewpoint is limited in space. He is not omnipresent and misses events which take place elsewhere (187–8).

By introducing a god as his narrator, Banville makes the impossibility of his narrative situation explicit, while at the same time playfully com-menting on the godlike features of an authorial narrator. ‘I it is who have contrived these things’, Hermes says (29), but also:

we do not come amongst you, not in the actual fact of being here, whatever I may claim to the contrary. To us your world is what the world in mirrors is to you. A burnished, crystalline place, sparkling and clear, with everything just as it is on this side, only reversed, and infi nitely unreachable. A looking- glass world, indeed, and only that. (260–1)

The gods’ relationship to the world of humans, as portrayed in the novel, is very much like that of the omniscient narrator to the narrated world, or for that matter, like the position of the reader, facing a fi ctional world. While Hermes explicitly addresses a human audience , the reader’s perspec-tive on the events of the story is that of the gods. Banville makes literal the disembodied presence of narrator and audience in omniscient narration and thus both draws attention to and resolves the paradox of simultaneous narration. He chooses a traditional narrative point of view, but emphasises its fi ctionality . He also makes explicit the position of reader and narra-tor as voyeurs, witnessing the unfolding of events in the present —a posi-tion which was already implied in much nineteenth-century omniscient narration .

This fl aunting of an impossible narrative situation adds a fantastic and humorous note to an essentially realist story of a failing patriarch and his damaged family. Both Banville’s narrator and the fi ctional world he pres-ents are decidedly slippery, though. The narrative position slips repeatedly and quite inexplicably from Hermes’s quasi- omniscient perspective into the fi rst- person perspective of old Adam, lying in a coma on his death-bed in a room at the top of the house. There is no neat separation between these two narrative positions, but one merges into the other and back again. It remains entirely undecidable whether Hermes occasionally takes up Adam’s perspective or whether Adam imagines himself to be Hermes


and actually becomes or believes himself to be omniscient in his coma. At the same time, the world the novel presents gradually turns out to be a subtly alternative version of our own. In this world, Wallace instead of Darwin becomes famous for the theory of evolution (90), Kleist is better known than Goethe (161) and Oppenheimer never succeeded in building the nuclear bomb (171). Old Adam’s scientifi c discoveries have helped to develop futuristic technology, like the use of salt water as an inexhaustible source of clean energy (262), but on the other hand armies still seem to fi ght with medieval means (185). The fi ctional world is therefore a weird hybrid of the future and the past and an alternative present .

Meanwhile, the multiple worlds and indistinguishable narrators are in keeping with the novel’s title and main theme: the infi nities. Old Adam, an ingenious mathematician, has revolutionised science with his discovery of infi nities, infi nite worlds and infi nite times, ‘an infi nity of infi nities, […] all crossing and breaking into each other, all here and invisible, a complex of worlds beyond what anyone before him had imagined ever was there’ (170). Possible worlds and possible viewpoints, man and gods, narrators and characters merge and interweave here, all part of the same complex of infi nities. At the same time, Adam, in his coma, is caught in another kind of infi nity, ‘stuck in the present , though his preference would be the preterite. As for the future , he avoids it as the plague’ (32–3). The present tense is the adequate tense both of stasis and of infi nity, in which time may pass but is never past and does not turn into a future . As the tense with the widest possibilities of temporal reference the present tense corresponds best to the needs of this story of infi nities.

CONCLUDING REMARKS Discussing simultaneous narration, Gérard Genette suggested that by erasing the temporal distance between the act or narration and the nar-rated events, narrative threatens to privilege either the narrative voice or the events of the story, and thus tends either towards interior monologue or objective report (218) . Suzanne Fleischman has therefore claimed that present-tense narration forfeits its narrativity and approximates either drama or poetry (308) .

As the examples I have discussed in this chapter show, this assessment cannot account for the variety of aesthetic projects to be found in contem-porary present-tense narration. I therefore concur with James Phelan ’s criticism of Fleischman . Phelan points out that Fleischman ’s theoretical

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account of narrative tense is fi rmly based on a mimetic standard of nar-rative but that recent examples of present-tense narration challenge us to re-examine that standard (224–5). In all the examples I have discussed in this chapter, the narrative voice remains clearly marked as narrative , even though its simultaneous act of narration may be mimetically speaking impossible.

All of the examples of fi rst- person narration feature narrators which clearly address their story as a narrative to an audience, even frequently employing direct reader addresses , notwithstanding the simultaneity of the act of narration with the events of the story. In this they differ from the interior monologue -type of present-tense usage, which I have discussed in the previous chapter. At the same time, they go much beyond a mere observer’s current report of events. The stories are presented in an act of narration without time and location, to an addressee who has no place in the narrated world. While simultaneous fi gural narration needs pose much less problems for the mimetic standard, as the example of Moore’s The Lighthouse has shown, I have discussed in detail some novels which draw specifi c attention to their unusual narrative setups. Mantel’s Tudor novels feature a narrative voice which is constructed as contemporary to its protagonist, but hard to situate either outside or inside of the latter’s consciousness. Meanwhile, Kennedy’s The Blue Book features the (impos-sible) act of simultaneous narration not only in its discourse , but as a central element in the development of its story. With authorial narration fi nally, simultaneous narration merely accentuates the presentifying ten-dency inherent in the narrative perspective and can therefore be employed without necessarily calling much attention to itself. Among the examples I have mentioned, only Banville’s The Infi nities draws explicit attention to the impossibility of its narrative situation by introducing a god as narrator.

Irrespective of the narrative point of view chosen, the use of a simulta-neous present tense often implies a restriction of the narrator’s knowledge and perspective and consigns judgement to the reader. Since there is no retrospective knowledge on the part of the narrator, the narration osten-sibly unfolds without teleology. Simultaneous fi rst- person narration which stresses the narrator’s ignorance of the future has been made popular by J. M. Coetzee . Discussing Waiting for the Barbarians , Phelan perceptively points out that in such a case a tension arises between the narrative per-spective and the position of the implied author, whom the reader expects to provide the teleology the narrative perspective lacks. Simultaneous fi rst- person narrators cannot know they are telling a coherent story, but readers


know they can expect one. Readers therefore always already know more than the narrator. My discussion of Crace’s Harvest amply illustrates this tension. At the same time, as Phelan points out, the narrator’s understand-ing always comes ‘provisionally and in pieces, [and] so too does ours’ (234). Even while they have a certain advantage in knowledge, readers must struggle to maintain the necessary distance in order to be able to exceed the limited knowledge of the narrator (see Phelan 234–5). While this tension is most obvious in fi rst- person narration, aspects of it can also be found in both Mantel’s and Kennedy’s fi gural narration. Readers of Mantel’s trilogy know both (historically) more than the protagonist and less, since Cromwell remains for the most part opaque. At the same time the narrative proximity makes it almost impossible to attain the necessary distance to judge events and Cromwell’s actions. Meanwhile, Kennedy’s Blue Book makes the difference between refl ector and implied author explicit by means of its second- person passages. The novel presents itself from the very beginning as a directed narrative with a rhetorical aim, a presentation which stands in stark tension with its simultaneous narration. Finally, my discussion has shown that even in the case of an authorial per-spective simultaneous narration may (but does not have to) imply a certain restriction on the usual omniscience .

While none of the novels discussed in this chapter confi rms Fleischman ’s concern that simultaneous narration would tip into drama , an emphasis on visuality can be noted as a recurrent aspect which is, however, more often merely evoked than actually exploited. Mantel’s own reference to a camera in connection with the narrative perspective of her Tudor nov-els turns out to be deceptive, and Banville’s narrator Hermes might urge readers repeatedly to look, but there is, in fact, not much to see since strik-ingly little ever happens in this story, which is almost entirely focused on the characters’ internal lives . Even The Yips , which is the most genuinely dramatic among all examples, far exceeds the representational limitations of dramatic texts and hints at visuality as an aesthetic device rather than employing its restrictions rigorously. Rather surprisingly, what seems to be much more frequently stressed across the different narrative perspectives is a conversational quality. Instead of distancing themselves from genu-ine narrative, the majority of the examples I have discussed explicitly or implicitly stress the fact that the story is addressed as a narrative to some-one, even though no mimetically plausible narrative situation emerges.

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CHAPTER 7

Abstract This chapter addresses novels which combine different usages of the present tense, either blending different aspects of the present tense like Nadine Gordimer’s Get a Life or Richard Powers Orfeo , or combining them structurally to mark different narrative perspectives like Ali Smith’s Hotel World and How to Be Both , Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings or André P. Brink’s Philida . The discussion of such combinations of present-tense usage serves to revisit and further refi ne the observations of the previous chapters and shows both the complexity of contemporary present-tense usage and its frequent disregard for mimetically plausible narrative situations.

Keywords present-tense narration • mix of narrative situations

Readers who have followed my discussion throughout will have already noticed that a categorisation as I have pursued it here is necessarily prob-lematic and has diffi culties accounting for the multiplicity of literary pos-sibilities. It may serve as a means to structure discussion in the attempt to highlight similarities and differences but it should not be mistaken as an end in itself. Some of the categorisations I have undertaken so far could easily be challenged: to discuss Rachel Seiffert’s The Dark Room , for exam-ple, as a work of retrospective narration takes perhaps too little account of the book’s last part, whose narrative situation could be more accurately

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described as simultaneous . In other cases, like David Mitchell’s novels The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and The Bone Clocks , it is diffi cult to decide whether their present-tense narration is simultaneous or retro-spective , but neither does the distinction matter much in their aesthetic conception. Meanwhile, the difference between simultaneous narration and interior monologue mainly hinges on how explicitly the narrative is addressed to an audience. Furthermore, some of the novels I have discussed as narrative deictic might also be considered as simultaneous narration, as least as far as their present-tense frame story is concerned.

Along different lines, John Burnside’s Glister sits somewhat uneasily in the category of fi rst- person narration, since the fi rst- person narrator serves at the same time as an omniscient authorial narrator, while the opposite is true for John Banville’s The Infi nities , which I have discussed as an authorial narra-tion, even though its narrator is so prominent and so strongly individualised that he features as a character of the story in his own right. Tom M cCarthy’s C , for that matter, could perhaps also appropriately have been discussed as a fi gural narration, since most of the novel has Serge as a refl ector and the nar-rator is mostly hidden. Nevertheless, there is a perceptible distance between the narrative voice and Serge in C ; and Hermes, Banville’s narrator , does not predominately tell his own story, while Leonhard in Glister does. The categorisations, therefore, seemed appropriate even while they confi rm Stanzel ’s own observation about his categories: that they are open and can merge and blend into each other ( Typische Formen 52–5).

There are a number of novels, though, which combine or blend perspec-tives and types of present-tense narration so persistently that any categorisa-tion along the lines I have suggested would necessarily obscure important aspects. In some cases such blending occurs continually, others employ combinations of different narrative perspectives and types of present-tense narration structurally, to distinguish different parts of the narrative.

BLENDED NARRATIVES As I have mentioned before, simultaneous and retrospective narration are not always easy to distinguish. Whether the present tense is used simul-taneously or retrospectively can only be inferred from the context, from the way a story is structured or from the comments of a narrator. In Nicola Barker’s novel Clear (2004), however, the narrative perspective is, paradoxically, both explicitly simultaneous and retrospective . The novel frequently employs large paragraph breaks in order to indicate gaps in

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the eloquent narrator Adair’s fl ow of words, for example when he takes a break to masturbate:

Uh … Sorry. Quick fi ve minute break, there, to ponder a little more on the manifold virtues of Ms Von Gerkan. [large paragraph break] Yeah. That’s better. [another large paragraph break] Now where were we? (140–1)

Scenes such as this work on the premise of simultaneous narration, of a coinciding of narration and narrative events. At other moments, however, the novel explicitly uses the present tense in a retrospective sense, not only in an explicit fl ashback to the events of a previous evening (97), but also on the level of the narrative present, as is indicated, for example, in the use of the determiner in the following passage: ‘Bly and I actually stroll down there together— companionably , if you must know—that last Thursday night’ (335; original emphasis).

From the two passages I have quoted, it must have become apparent that this novel is decidedly conversational . Adair constantly addresses the reader directly , comments on the events taking place and on the people he meets. In spite of his 28 years of age, his voice is still that of a youth , with few ties or responsibilities, obsessed with sex and with the impression he makes on others. While logically inconsistent, the usage of the present tense signifi cantly adds to the immediate conversational style of the novel, and to its humorous tone. Adair’s voice is highly idiosyncratic, but part of his idiosyncrasy is precisely that he lacks critical distance to the situations into which he stumbles, a lack that adds to the youthfulness of his voice. Interestingly, Barker does not shy away from risking a narrative paradox, combining simultaneous and retrospective narration in order to make her narrator’s voice most effective. Since no mimetically believable commu-nicative situation would allow for the kind of fi rst- person simultaneous narration presented by Adair in any case, the novel’s paradoxical usage of both simultaneous and retrospective elements makes little further differ-ence. A reader who expects to be presented with a mimetically conceivable narrative situation will be baffl ed at every turn.

The use of different narrative tenses is even more challenging in Nadine Gordimer’s Get a Life (2005). The novel tells the story of Paul, young

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father of a family, who has to go into quarantine at his parents’ place because he emits dangerous radiation after having had to undergo medical treat-ment for cancer. It also tells the story of Paul’s mother, Lyndsay, who, after Paul has recovered, is left by her husband and ends up adopting a badly abused and HIV-positive young child. At another level, it is about the way in which Paul’s family reels under but manages to deal with both these situations. Finally, the story involves Paul’s professional struggle as a con-servationist against the exploitation and destruction of the environment.

The novel’s narrative perspective keeps shifting from past tense to pres-ent tense, from omniscient narration to fi gural narration, from a retro-spective (historical) present tense to interior monologue , and it does so in ways that are diffi cult to account for. For example, towards the end of the novel, the family goes on an outing:

Paul read out from a leafl et picked up at the entrance to the park space […]. The two small children neither listen nor understand , the information is for himself, Lyndsay and Benni [Paul’s wife], Nicholas and Klara are simply excited at the beginning of any excursion. Do they know what an eagle is? You’re going to see a ve-ery big bird. Lyndsay attempted to make the excite-ment specifi c but the focus of the two for whom the world of nature is new was wide and low, there were gaudy butterfl ies to chase and Nickie spied a caterpillar articulated like the coaches of a toy train. (160; my emphases)

Such constant, apparently unmotivated, tense switching continues throughout this and other scenes of the novel. Rather than serving as rhetorical markers of moments of particular intensity and vividness (as has often been claimed for the historical present ), in Gordimer’s novel they usually (though not consistently) serve to mark subtle shifts of perspective, from a narrative voice to the point of view of the characters.

This is perhaps even more obvious in scenes in which the switch is not only to a character’s perspective, but to interior monologue proper:

No connection between that quarantine room and out here. The garden. It’s both the place banished to in order to be got rid of by the preoccupations of an adult house, and the place to be yourself, against orders. Homework abandoned unfi nished, there’s no reproach in the nagging cries of hadedas, as they touch down on trees and earth-beds, close by. Could almost put out a hand and touch one. The mother-of-pearl sheen casually attractingly fl ashed as the dull dark plumage catches the sun; wouldn’t have noticed then just as it was years to soon for the glint of a glance from a woman to be caught. […]

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While here with eyes climbing favoured trees, moving over the exhila-rated pace of somersaults, pursuing the capture of a vivid grass snake green under kicked-aside leaves, he could think of looking at conclusions gathered from someone else’s walk in the wilderness of swamp, mangrove, watery broth of life.

But when he got himself roused, back into quarantine to pick up the few sheets of paper conscientiously word-processed by an institute secretary; he put the thing aside, not on the foot of the bed again but slid on a pile of video cassettes. (50–1)

The passage illustrates well the almost imperceptible shift from the pro-tagonist’s interior monologue to the narrator’s perspective. The fi rst para-graph is clearly Paul’s interior monologue, while he spends time in his childhood garden during the period of his isolation. In the second para-graph the perspective shifts even within one sentence, which starts with the spatially deictic ‘here’ marking Paul’s present moment but then shifts to the narrative past tense (the progressive forms in this sentence are tense- neutral, working both in a present-tense and in a past- tense context). The third paragraph, fi nally, is presented by the narrative voice in past tense .

I have quoted this passage extensively in order to make the point that there is more to Gordimer’s technique of tense switching and present- tense narration than a play with narrative perspective. Her usage of the present tense seems to be also, at least in part, motivated by thematic concerns of the novel. Separated from his own wife and son, the adult Paul is thrown back into a childhood state , a state of uncomfortable, enforced second innocence. He spends his time either sleeping or in the (paradisia-cal) garden, evading any call upon him to take up responsibility. He is in a kind of limbo, a numb routine in which days merge into each other with little change in a timeless present . The present tense is used in its itera-tive sense, to evoke habit or stasis. At the same time, the quotation above serves well to show how the difference between his childhood and his present state becomes blurry for Paul and how he re-experiences the past as present, even while the last sentence of the fi rst paragraph shows that he remains aware of the lapse of time between them.

Finally, there is a further aspect to this, which plays on the present tense as a tense of description . The novel includes several passages of detailed descriptions of nature and ecosystems, in particular the Okavango delta. Their timelessness is contrasted with the humanly perceptible pres-ent: ‘Okavango left to itself will renew eternally. […] People don’t live eternity ; they live a fi nite Now’ (182). Two aspects of the present tense

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clash here: timeless eternity and the present moment in temporal fl ux. By combining and contrasting them, Get a Life is struggling to fi nd ways to reconcile humans and nature.

Another novel which combines different forms of present-tense narra-tion is Richard Powers’s Orfeo (2014). The structure of the novel is similar to the ones I have discussed in the chapter on narrative deictic usage of the present tense: it combines two narrative levels, one set in the present , in which Peter Els, who composed a piece of music by genetically manipulat-ing bacteria, fl ees from the authorities, who accuse him of terrorism. The other narrative level recounts Peter’s past , his formation as a composer, and his relation to his family and his friend, Richard Bonner. In addi-tion, there are occasional chapters which focus on events in the history of music. In this novel, however, the present tense is not used to indicate the deictic centre from which the narration takes place. Counterintuitively, it is often the chapters focusing on the past which are narrated in a ret-rospective present tense, while the narration of Richard’s fl ight from the police is mainly narrated in the past tense . This retrospective present tense cannot in this case be read as evoking vivid, visual memories of the pro-tagonist himself. While the narrative perspective throughout the novel is mostly fi gural , with Richard as a refl ector , Richard’s past is narrated in fl ashbacks which clearly do not originate in Richard’s own consciousness but are insertions by the narrator. Furthermore, this usage of the present tense is not consistent throughout the novel. While tense switches do sel-dom occur within chapters, as they do in Gordimer’s Get a Life , a number of chapters pursuing the story of Peter’s past are written in past tense , and some of the chapters narrating Peter’s fl ight are narrated in the present tense with no immediately discernible pattern or reason.

Present and past tense are therefore used almost interchangeably in Orfeo , but their usage is not entirely arbitrary. The present tense is chosen particularly for those chapters and sections of the novel in which the pro-tagonist listens to music. The novel includes several beautiful and highly lyrical descriptions of musical compositions. As descriptions, these use the present tense but this descriptive present tense then spills over into the narrative surrounding them. It is the music, then, which transcends the usual boundaries between past and present, as well as between past and present tense. And indeed, the time-transcending and time-dissolving qualities of music are a sort of leitmotif of the novel: ‘All my music ever wanted,’ Peter says, ‘was to tunnel into forever through a wall of Now’ (107). In music, the difference between past and present dissolves: ‘Music

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forecasts the past , recalls the future . Now and then the difference falls away, and in one simple gift of circling sound, the ear solves the scrambled cryptogram. One abiding rhythm, present and always, and you’re free. But a few measures more, and the cloak of time closes back around you’ (28). The novel’s frequent alteration between past and present tense thus becomes a formal realisation of one of its thematic concerns, even to the point in which the promised escape from time is denied at the end and we are enfolded once more by ‘the cloak of time’.

At the end of the novel, the formerly retrospective present tense does turn briefl y into a kind of deictic present tense . Still on the run, but resigned to the inevitable end, Peter starts to justify his actions in a series of tweets. These tweets, readers realise at this point, constitute the brief comments which separate the novel’s chapters from each other. While reading Peter’s story, readers have thus at the same time followed his tweet. Eventually, the story brings Peter to the house of his daughter where he is accosted by the police. For this fi nal part, narrated in a simultaneous present tense, the narrative switches to the second person , with the narrator addressing Peter as ‘you’. At this moment, facing both his daughter and arrest, time has caught up with Peter, rooting him in the moment . The fi nal paragraph then switches to the future tense, projecting a possible, even probable ending, in which Peter runs out of the house to be shot by his persecutors:

When she nods, even a little, you’ll head to the door and through it. Run out into a place fresh and green and alert again to whole new dangers. You’ll keep moving, vivace, as far as you can get, your bud vial high, like a con-ductor readying his baton to cue something luckier than anyone supposes. Downbeat of a little infi nity. And at last you will hear how this piece goes. (369)

Time has caught up with Peter and the infi nity of death is waiting, but the novel closes in this suspended moment before the event, celebrating the power of narration, which, similar to music in this, can suspend time in an endless moment.

COMBINATION OF PERSPECTIVES Marlon James’s mosaic of narrative voices A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014) employs a mix of all the different kinds of present-tense narration which I have discussed. This story about Jamaica is told from multiple

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perspectives, all of them fi rst- person and all of them very colloquial . The tendency to use the present tense instead of the past tense in Jamaican English abets the constant slippage between retrospective and simultane-ous present-tense narration in this novel. Moreover, the many voices which contribute to this novel also include instances of deictic present tense , for example when CIA agent Barry Difl orio recalls recent events while sitting in a fast-food store (16–22). Interior monologue is used consistently in the case of young Bam- Bam , whose voice even occasionally loses narra-tive coherence, reproducing Bam-Bam’s drug-hazed state of mind (e.g. 236–44), but other voices in the novel oscillate between simultaneous or retrospective narration with direct reader addresses and interior mono-logue . Papa-Lo’s narrative voice is representative of this. He occasionally explicitly addresses his audience as ‘gentlemens’ (e.g. 23; 127), and his narrative uses the present tense to recount both past and present narrative developments, but at the moment of his death his narrative voice turns into a continuous stream of consciousness without punctuation (360–2). The concrete act of narration that is indicated by the direct address of the ‘gentlemens’ therefore never emerges as a specifi c narrative situation and Papa-Lo, as well as a number of other characters in the novel, impossibly narrates his own death.

Meanwhile, even with the fi rst voice which opens the narrative, the novel announces its disregard for mimetically plausible narrative situa-tions. Sir Arthur George Jennings serves as a personalised omniscient nar-rator, a position he can assume because he is dead. Similarly to Banville’s The Infi nities , James thus fl aunts the mimetic impossibility of narrative omniscience and frees his novel from the very beginning from expec-tations of adherence to the mimetic standard of narration. In James’s merciless account of crime, murder and death, this allows him to let his characters account for their fate even to the moment of their death. This novel, which draws on historical material , stops short from being an overly fantastical litany of ghostly voices, however. Only Jennings, the implied authorial narrative coordinator, speaks from beyond the grave . Once again, the narrative situations are chosen in view of their affective potential without concern for their mimetic plausibility. Nonetheless, this does not impair the novel’s claims to accurately depict the endless circle of violence, crime and corruption which marks Jamaican history . Quite the contrary, an escape from the constraints of a mimetically plausible narra-tive situation allows James to let the dead, the illiterate and the silenced speak for themselves.

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André Brink’s Philida (2012), a novel about a slave girl in South Africa spanning the years 1832– 1834 , similarly calls upon the voices of historical characters to bear witness to their own story. In contrast to James’s novel, however, an overt authorial narrator orchestrates the different voices com-prising the narrative. In the fi rst part of Philida , several of the protago-nists themselves take voice to tell a part of their own story. Only in the second part does the omniscient narrative proper take over, while the last part gives voice to the girl Philida once again. Meanwhile, throughout the novel, chapters are headed with what pretend to be brief plot summaries in the style of nineteenth-century realism . Instead of preparing the reader for what is to come, though, they for the most part amount to rather mystify-ing authorial comments which reveal fairly little about the actual chapter contents. At other times, they take on a narrative function, introducing and connecting the events narrated in subsequent chapters. Even in the fi rst part of the novel, which is dominated by the voices of the characters, the authorial narrator thus keeps explicit control.

The various characters’ voices appear to be bearing witness, explicitly framing their story as an act of narrative address. Throughout this, retro-spective (and vernacular) present tense merges with simultaneous present tense, often without any clear distinction. This, for example, is how the novel starts:

Here come shit. Just one look, and I can see it coming. Here I walk all this way and God know that is bad enough […] and now there’s no turning back, it’s straight on to hell and gone. This is the man I got to talk to if I want to lay a charge, they tell me […].

It’s a long story. First he want to fi nd out everything about me, and it’s one question after another. (3)

Clearly, in Philida’s vernacular, past- tense forms are generally rarely used and temporal relations have to be derived from the context. In this pas-sage, however, the context is not without ambiguity. The deictic markers at the beginning of the quotation (‘here’, ‘now’, ‘this way’, ‘this man’) seem to indicate simultaneous narration, but the second paragraph suggests retrospection (‘It’s a long story’, ‘First …’). The end of this chapter—in which Philida goes to lodge an offi cial complaint about Frans, the son of her owner—once again suggests simultaneous narration in its emphasis on the uncertainty of Philida’s situation: ‘Today, there’s nothing sure about anything for me. But this little chance I got to use, otherwise it may be

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gone for ever. […] All I got is to sit here in the cell and wait, with the baby on my lap’ (13). These constantly occurring shifts from simultaneous to retrospective present tense in the fi rst- person acts of narrative witnessing of the fi rst part of the novel can be highly disorienting as to the narrative posi-tion of their speakers. Recounting his actions of the night before Philida is sent away from the farm, Frans, for example, shifts several times from an apparently simultaneous to an explicitly retrospective point of view:

I suppose tonight will be the last time I leave my footprints behind in this dark place. A testimony unto the LordGod. For tomorrow you are going away and I must remain behind on my own. […] Around me the leaves are rustling and whispering. […] And then something terrible happens. Afterwards I come to think that I must have kicked over the lamp, but when I fi rst see it I have no inkling at all of how it happened. All of a sudden everything around me is just turning to fi re. (138–40)

Just as in the instance quoted above from Philida’s narrative, Frans’s nar-rative position in this passage is an impossibly schizophrenic one, appar-ently both simultaneous and retrospective at once.

In the second part of the novel, which is entirely narrated by the autho-rial narrator, the use of the present tense is more consistently retrospective and indeed occasionally alternates with past-tense narration proper. The authorial perspective, which in the fi rst part was mainly apparent in the chapter summaries, in the second part explicitly takes up the position of a historian , using the present tense retrospectively , to reimagine and rein-habit the past . The acknowledgements of the novel further highlight the novel’s basis in historical material and characters, which are reimagined by the narrator. The addressee of the fi rst- person statements of the fi rst part of the novel thus appears to be the historian-narrator himself. The historical characters tell their stories to the authorial narrator, who records their testimonies. The dual temporal status of their narration, both simul-taneous and retrospective , thus corresponds with the historian’s percep-tion of their voices as speaking from the past , but in their present. This is an eminently fi ctional and metaleptic situation of narrative communica-tion, which cannot be accounted for mimetically . Rather, it highlights the imaginative process of both the writer, who imagines that these histori-cal characters tell him their story, and the reader, who experiences these characters as both historical and present . Only once Philida has left her masters’ farm does the narrator’s voice take over, since at this point of

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her story, she ‘almost totally disappears from recorded history ’, and the author confesses to have ‘had no choice but to rely on [his] imagination ’ (308). By employing the present tense, he stresses his attempt to reimag-ine the past rather than to look back on it and judge it from a historical distance . While the latter is the novel’s implicit aim and effect, that task is left to the reader.

Both the Brief History of Seven Killings and Philida are good examples of the way in which the present tense can be used in historical novels to attempt to evade the full authority of the historian ’s voice. Both are very similar in the way they grant a voice to historical characters, describing historical events as fi rst-hand witnesses, and even in their use of a ver-nacular that often fails to differentiate between past and present tense. Both allow several characters to speak—slaves and masters, victims and perpetrators, allowing them all to explain and justify their behaviour—but without granting them much hindsight on their own actions. In that way resembling dramatic monologues , the speakers unwittingly reveal their motives, their prejudices and their misconceptions. The reader is left to commiserate, judge and condemn.

While both Philida and the Brief History make use of present-tense narration in a historical setting , a combination of different types of present- tense narration plays quite a different role in Ali Smith’s Hotel World (2001) and How to Be Both (2014). Ali Smith, whose novel The Accidental I have already discussed in Chap. 5 , frequently uses combina-tions of different present- and past-tense perspectives in her novels. In Hotel World , this becomes structural to the point in which the chapter titles advertise the chapter’s tense focus: ‘ past’ is followed by ‘present his-toric ’, ‘future conditional’, ‘perfect’, ‘future in the past’, and fi nally ‘pres-ent’. The usage of tense and its designation in the chapter titles helps to develop six different narrative perspectives while serving as a constant reminder of the aesthetic construction of the narrative. Smith does make a further point about the interchangeability of past- and present-tense narration in the chapter ‘future conditional’ in which Lise remembers the events of a night which had already, from a different perspective, been the focus of the chapter ‘present historic’. These memories are recounted in the present tense, while Lise’s present moment, lying as an invalid in bed, is narrated in past tense . Furthermore, after the scenario of her memory has been briefl y sketched out, the narrative folds back unto itself, picking up individual words or phrases in reverse order, and commenting on them and providing further narrative information, all once again in present

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tense. The narration of her memory thus ends where it started: ‘ Lise, behind Reception, is at work : There she is, Lise, behind Reception, at work’ (118; original bold type). A narrative retrospective present tense evoking the vividness of this memory is thus combined with the ostensibly non- narrative present tense of the metatextual commentary. To sharpen the tense paradox even further, the memory ends with the words, ‘That is then. This was now’ (119), and returns to the past-tense narration of Lise, lying in bed as an invalid.

Beyond mere playfulness, Smith uses narrative tense to add nuances of narrative distancing. The multiple ways in which the present tense is employed in Hotel World serves very well to illustrate, though, that its effect is not necessarily immediacy . While the ‘historic present’ chapter, for example, develops an emphatically immediate perspective of the homeless Else, who very much lives in the moment , in Lise’s narrative the pres-ent tense is used to both evoke the vividness of memory and to create the perspective of a detached commenter and observer. The last chapter, fi nally, called ‘present’, starts with several pages of pure description of an early winter morning, before it eventually focuses its apparently neutral observer’s gaze on one more character relevant to the story. Instead of proximity, the present tense in this case suggests distance and detachment.

Smith uses different narrative tenses in The Accidental to add to her protagonists’ characterisation (see my discussion in Chap. 5 ), and in Hotel World , the use of different tenses follows a structural logic. In How to Be Both , present-tense narration fi nds primarily a thematic justifi cation. As one among many things which are doubled and two-sided in the novel, the present tense is used here to suggest both present and past: the pres-ence of the past in the present and the anteriority of the present itself. The novel consists of two parts, whose order is reversible (half of the published books have them in one order, half in the other). One part tells the story of the young girl George, whose mother has recently died suddenly. The narrative perspective is fi gural , but with a fairly intrusive narrator, and present tense is pervasive in this part, both retrospective and simultaneous . The very fi rst lines of this part emphasise this: ‘Consider this moral conun-drum for a moment, George’s mother says to George who’s sitting in the front passenger seat. Not says. Said. George’s mother is dead’ (189). Such a combination of a retrospective and a simultaneous present tense serves to emphasise throughout this part the enduring presence of the past and George’s diffi culty in dealing with her mother’s sudden absence. At the same time, it evokes a central topic of the novel: the layered technique of

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fresco painting, in which an original image is often covered with another, which differs signifi cantly. Throughout, the novel ambitiously sets out to realise what George dismisses as an impossibility: ‘Past or present? George says. […] It can’t be both. It must be one or the other’ (194).

At the very end of this part, at which we fi nd George at a picture gal-lery, looking at a painting by Renaissance painter Francesco del Cossa, the present moment of simultaneous narration is superseded by a brief proleptic summary of George’s near future , only to return to the present moment for the last few sentences: ‘But none of the above has happened. Not yet, anyway. For now, in the present tense, George sits in the gallery and looks at one of the old paintings on the wall’ (372). This proleptic summary, in fact turns out to be a forecast on what happens in the other part of the book. This part features the ghost of the painter Francescho (with an ‘h’) as a fi rst- person narrator, who is apparently unwittingly drawn from the dead into the present world by George’s interest in her painting (yes, in this novel the painter is secretly a woman). It employs a narrative deictic present tense for the ghost’s perceptions of contempo-rary England, while she follows George around and observes her actions. The main bulk of this part is, however, taken up the Francescho’s mem-ories of her own life, narrated for the most part in past tense . While Francescho’s deictic present tense can thus be read as a continuation of George’s simultaneous present, it also to a certain extent predates it. Not only because in some versions of the novel readers actually encounter it fi rst, but also because the painter’s memories recall the production of images which George had seen on a visit to Italy with her mother. Furthermore, the proleptic outlook at the end of George’s chapter antici-pates everything that happens in Francescho’s deictic present . In view of this, Francescho’s present becomes belated, reiterating a future that has already been forecast. At the same time, Francescho’s story lies both in George’s past , in her memories of her trip to Italy with her mother, and in her future , as she endeavours to fi nd out more about the painter. The point of all these temporal entanglements is surely to present a complex picture in which events and narratives can be past and present and even future all at the same time. It is an ambitious attempt to write a book in which each present is charged with multiple layers of past and future , an impossible book as George imagines it: ‘if things really did happen simultaneously it’d be like reading a book but one in which all the lines of the text have been overprinted, like each page is actually two pages but with one superimposed on the other to make it unreadable’ (196).

MIXED CASES 99

While certainly not unreadable, the novel’s attempt at reproducing such a fresco technique does serve to make the temporal and thematic rela-tions between its two parts quite challenging, opening ample room for interpretation.

CONCLUDING REMARKS The examples discussed in this chapter, which combine and blend different tense usages, might cause umbrage among narratological puritans expect-ing a mimetic and coherent framework of narration. Novels like Clear and Get a Life frequently switch between different tenses or aspects and do not eschew inconsistencies in their narrative perspective. Once a mimetic framework is no longer taken as a necessary reference, however, one can appreciate the way in which these novels exploit the possible implications and effects of different tense usages to their advantage. Meanwhile, a combination of tense usages frequently serves to characterise a variety of narrative voices or different parts of a novel. The effect may be a mosaic of voices and perspectives witnessing their present as employed in the his-torical novels Philida and A Brief History of Seven Killings , may follow a structural rationale as in Hotel World , or may develop thematic concerns as in How to Be Both .

The possibilities of such tense mixes are almost endless and the exam-ples I have discussed can only provide a limited picture. Once more, however, they amply illustrate that for much recent fi ction, maintaining a mimetic framework of narration is no longer a central concern. They seem to confi rm Avanessian and Hennig ’s suggestion that narration no longer serves as the main justifi cation of fi ction, but that fi ction fi nds its basis in itself and in its own processes of production and reception. The voices employed in the present-tense novel may often be highly narrative and colloquial (like the fi rst- person narrators in Philida , A Brief History , and How to Be Both ), but their narrative act itself is markedly fi ctional because mimetically speaking impossible.

100 I. HUBER

101© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016I. Huber, Present-tense Narration in Contemporary Fiction, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-56213-5

Abstract The conclusion revisits the results of the previous discussion to highlight some recurring effects and themes of contemporary present-tense narration. Among these are the popularity of youthful narrators, the tendency to refrain from narrative judgement and the aptitude of the present tense for open endings. It also addresses the question of why the present tense has become so popular, considering a number of differ-ent explanations which are often given (ranging from the rise of the new media and the triumph of the image to a postmodern resistance to history, or simply the infl uence of creative writing programmes) in the light of the textual evidence discussed in the previous chapters.

Keywords present-tense narration • present shock • postmodernism • role of media • young narrators

It has been my aim throughout this study to show the wide variety of very heterogeneous uses to which present-tense narration has been put in con-temporary literature. On the one hand, this contradicts those pessimists who associate the spread of present-tense narration with an impoverish-ment of narrative possibility. On the other hand, this brief overview should have made clear that present-tense narration cannot be narrowed down to a single rationale or effect. It would, for example, be wrong to claim that the present tense always suggests immediacy . It can also have quite the contrary effect and evoke detachment and distance. At the same time,

CONCLUSION

102 CONCLUSION

while it may indeed be appropriate for non- sequitur novels, as Casparis has argued, my discussion has shown that this is by no means the only way it can be employed. Similarly, to claim that present-tense narration generally implies either a stronger facticity or a higher fi ctionality would be mistaken. The effect it has always depends on how it is used and in which context. It can be employed both ways. Thus my main concern throughout has been to do justice to the individual situations of the nov-els which I have discussed, rather than to make some single general claim about present-tense narration.

The picture that has emerged from this discussion may admittedly be slightly distorted by my choice of examples. As might be expected, I paid particular attention to novels whose use of the present tense I found strik-ing in one way or another and which seemed to me to illustrate a particular possibility of present-tense usage. These novels always indicate some ratio-nale behind their use of present-tense narration, be it stylistic, thematic or structural, or all at once. Taking a wider view on contemporary present- tense narration, however, has shown that this is by no means always the case. There are in fact many novels where the usage of the present tense does seem fairly arbitrary and which would be little affected if they were rewritten in the more conventional past tense . This is not to say that in such cases the choice of the present tense is in some way invalid. Rather it would seem to show that the present tense has indeed recently become a narrative tense on par with the past tense . It is no longer marked as par-ticularly unusual and its choice no longer has to be necessarily justifi ed by some larger aesthetic aim. It is entirely possible that a project such as mine will soon come to seem as futile as an attempt to characterise the many aesthetic possibilities of past-tense narration would be deemed today.

In spite of the heterogeneity of the novels I have discussed, it is pos-sible to make a few general observations. Many of the novels which I have discussed pay no particular heed to a mimetically recuperable narrative situation . Indeed, particularly in the rather frequent case of fi rst- person simultaneous narration, the paradox of the narrative situation is often even further emphasised by a decidedly conversational narrative voice. Narrators like Vernon in Pierre’s Vernon God Little or Walter in Crace’s Harvest clearly address their narratives to an audience, even while there is no mimetically plausible point in time in which their act of narration could take place, nor an audience that would fi nd a place in the narrative world. Moreover, this impossibility is openly acknowledged by the considerable number of novels which feature ghosts or gods as narrators. To some

CONCLUSION 103

extent, this seems to confi rm Avanessian and Hennig ’s suggestion that narration no longer necessarily serves as the plausible basis of fi ction’s gen-esis but that fi ctionality itself is highlighted (‘Altermoderne Roman’ 255). Indeed, present-tense narration can serve to emphasise fi ctionality by frus-trating any attempt to recuperate the narrative as an act of non- fi ctional communication . However, Avanessian and Hennig ’s formulation might be slightly misleading in that it may suggest that narrativity loses impor-tance. For the majority of my examples this is by no means the case. Rather, their often decidedly narrative and conversational quality is indeed often heightened by the colloquial association of the present tense.

In fact, some recent present-tense narration can be accounted for partly or entirely by the use of particular dialects of English which favour the pres-ent over the past tense . James’s use of Jamaican English in A Brief History of Seven Killings is one among many examples, as are novels like Brink’s Philida or NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names (2013), which use African English varieties, or Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake (2013), which develops its own variety of Old English. In some such cases, it becomes diffi cult to decide whether they should be considered present-tense nar-ration at all. The very idiosyncratic language of The Wake , for example, mixes past and present tense consistently and indeed often makes it fairly hard to keep them apart altogether. In this case, the use of the present tense seems to be mainly a stylistic idiosyncrasy of the narrative voice, instead of present-tense narration proper.

Apart from these general tendencies, there are also a number of top-ics and concerns that strikingly reoccur in recent present-tense narration. To me the most intriguing one is the frequency with which the present tense is used to create the perspective of a young narrator or refl ector , often in fi rst- person narration. Donoghue’s Room is a typical example, but the young narrators proliferate: Eiji in Mitchell’s number9dream , Adair in Barker’s Clear , Sam in Smaill’s The Chimes , Bam-Bam in James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings , to name just a few. The present tense seems par-ticularly appropriate to the perspective of the young , who do not yet have a long past to look back on and whose voices are evoked directly, without the maturer hindsight of retrospective narration. Astrid in Smith’s The Accidental , who is proud that she is ‘25 percent new, 75 percent old’ cen-tury and therefore signifi cantly newer than her sibling and parents seems typical for such a young perspective that focuses primarily on the present moment (11). Even beyond present-tense narration, children or young narrators seem to have developed a considerable appeal for contemporary

104 CONCLUSION

authors. As far as I know, this phenomenon has not yet been extensively studied. In his study of contemporary culture, Digimodernism , Alan Kirby speaks rather pessimistically of an infantilisation of digimodernist culture, in which stories for children are remade to appeal to an adult audience and in which playing (video)games is an activity that is no longer limited to childhood. Kirby , however, takes umbrage to the kind of infantilised stories that are being told and sold, particularly in popular culture, but does not refer specifi cally to young narrators. Indeed, the complexity of a novel like Burnside’s Glister or Donoghue’s Room would belie accusa-tions of infantilisation. Young narrators are employed in highly sophisti-cated narrative settings and the stories they tell are not children’s stories. A different reason for the popularity of young narrators has been sug-gested by Raoul Eshelman , who proposes that children may be attractive narrators and protagonists for a recent literature that has turned its back on a postmodernist scepticism towards selfhood and identity. The naive child, so Eshelman suggests, stands yet apart from the discourses forming and governing a mature identity and thus offers a possibility to depict a kind of unifi ed subjectivity that postmodernism had declared impossible ( Performatism 8–9, see also ‘What is Performatism?’). However, while there are some children among the young narrators I have encountered, most are youths or young adults, and while they might be immature, they are not naive, or innocent. It may also be that the perspective of the young seems particularly relevant in a world which changes so rapidly that past experience no longer necessarily serves as a reliable guideline, or that the obsession with youthfulness which governs contemporary media images and health discourses fi nds an unsuspected echo in literature. Most of the novels featuring young narrators that I have discussed in this study, however, rely on the reader to provide the critical distance that the narra-tor’s voice is lacking. More often than not, therefore, the main effect lies not in an identifi cation with, or uncritical endorsement of, the perspective of the young , but in an emphasis on the advantage of readers in maturity and knowledge, and their ability to understand and judge better than the protagonists .

Another, perhaps less surprising recurring topic in present-tense narra-tion is the vividness of memory , that is, the power of memory to make the past present. A retrospective use of the present tense in particular often fi nds its justifi cation in such an evocation of a past that arises almost visu-ally before the eye of the one who recalls it. This may be considered part of a general interest in memory which is noticeable in a wider cultural

CONCLUSION 105

context and in academia, in which the multidisciplinary fi eld of memory studies has seen a signifi cant growth over the last few decades. It may, however, also be at least in part a reaction to a postmodernist subversion of historical authority . The turn to memory instead of history allows for truth claims that are always qualifi ed as individual and possibly faulty. Memory is typically evoked as vivid but individual, always with the acknowledged possibility of fabrication . Thus, the narrator can claim truthfulness, even while admitting error: ‘this is truly how I remember it, but my memory may be wrong’. Meanwhile, the use of the present tense serves to both emphasise the immediacy and vividness of the memory and to qualify it as a (possibly faulty) act of imaginative evocation .

In critical literature, much emphasis has been given to the possibility of the present tense to refrain from judgement by presenting fi ctive events as they happen, thereby foreclosing a retrospective hindsight of the narrative perspective, which would indicate some sort of evaluation. Judgement is left to the reader. Therefore, it has been argued that present-tense narra-tion is particularly suitable to non- sequitur novels (see Casparis ), namely, novels in which narrative events and characters’ actions scarcely seem to follow a consistent and coherently motivated sequence. Rather, characters stumble from one event to the other without drawing conclusions from the past or projecting ideas on the future . The same characteristic of present- tense narration has also led to it being hailed as a way to avoid the author-ity of history in historical novels (see Miyahara ). Many of the novels which I have discussed take advantage of this possibility of the present tense to remove critical distance from the narrative point of view. However, the variety of my examples amply illustrates that the non-sequitur novel or a subversion of historical authority are merely two among many possible effects of this aspect of the present tense. Indeed, few among my exam-ples would be entirely accurately described as non-sequitur novels. As I have already suggested, the lack of retrospective distance frequently serves to abet the perspective of a youthful narrator. Furthermore, a novel like Crace’s Harvest , for example, develops its plot with a relentless logic in which each event contributes to the rapid destruction of the community, with the inevitability of fate. Though the narrative perspective of Walter provides no retrospective judgement on the developments, the result is not an impression of arbitrariness or even an evasion of judgement. Walter tells his story in order to be judged but leaves the judgement to the reader. At the same time, while Harvest and many of the other historical novels I have discussed do feature voices and perspectives which offi cial history has

106 CONCLUSION

marginalised, they often draw heavily on the reader’s historical knowledge to make sense of their stories and to put them into context. A novel like M cCarthy’s C , for example, may insistently hint at a multitude of subtle causal relations and thematic interconnections but leave them entirely to the reader to sort out. At the same time, instead of questioning historical authority , it relies on a reader’s knowledge of history in order to provide the context for its historical setting and thus to add further clues to its puzzle. Instead of undermining historical authority , it could therefore be argued, such novels rely on it to add a further dimension of meaning to their narratives. What they do indeed avoid, however, is the explic-itly or implicitly judgemental stance of the historian . The retrospective assessment that is missing from their present-tense narration is once more expected from the reader.

The last fairly common feature of present-tense narration which I would like to highlight is its possibility to suggest an open ending . Past- tense narration always indicates that there is a future point in time from which the narrator can look back on the events of the narrative. Even this basic certainty is lacking in present-tense narration. Thus, a simultaneous fi rst- person narrator may well die at the end of his or her narrative, as is the case for some of the narrators in James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings , or Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks . Moreover, as the fi rst two parts of Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy in particular have shown, present-tense narration can even question whether there is a future at all. Nevertheless, radically open endings are rare among my examples. Even Atwood provides an ending with a hopeful future in the fi nal novel of her trilogy.

There are a number of aspects which are conspicuously missing from this list, although one might have expected them to play a major role in the recent popularity of present-tense narration. Thus, I have found that the aspect of visuality in the imitation of visual media does not seem to be a major factor in the appeal of the present tense. While visuality is occa-sionally evoked, an emphatically conversational quality which highlights narrativity is far more frequent. What is more, new media and our contem-porary communication-saturated culture more generally feature strikingly little in the novels. Though one might think that the popularity of pres-ent-tense narration might be connected to the rapid turnover and almost pathological need for up-to-dateness of contemporary Western societies, this is rarely translated directly into present-tense fi ction. Even modern communication technologies like emails, mobile telephones or the inter-net rarely make an appearance. Instead, I have encountered numerous

CONCLUSION 107

historical novels , some dystopian ones, and others which are set in an inde-terminate time, but certainly before the rise of the internet. Among the 40-plus novels which I have discussed, only three feature the new media prominently: Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being , in which emails are writ-ten and the internet serves as a space of torment and as a gateway to the world; Powers’s Orfeo , in which a Smartphone becomes one of the most important (and dangerous) possessions of a man on the run; and Mitchell’s number9dream , which revels in the futuristic environment of contempo-rary Tokyo. Finally, I found that the modernist experiments with the pres-ent tense have left few traces in its contemporary usage. The present tense is rarely used to escape from narrativity by suggesting an objective, neutral report , preferring facticity over fi ctionality . Quite the contrary, it often emphasises narrativity and fi ctionality. While subjectivity and the exclusive representation of a character’s thoughts is somewhat more frequently met, few of those cases which suggest an interior monologue do so to the point of compromising their readability. Instead of reproducing the thoughts of their characters in a fragmented, continuous stream of consciousness , their narrative voices remain linear and coherent. Therefore, once again, in recent present-tense narration, narrativity and fi ctionality take precedence over a modernist endeavour to realistically reproduce thought processes and to search for alternatives to a plot -driven narrative.

What could be the reasons for the widespread popularity of present- tense narration in contemporary fi ction? One can only speculate. It is tempting to point to the work of sociologists and cultural critics like Hartmut Rosa , Helga Nowotny , Paul Virilio or Douglas Rushkoff , who all notice the peculiar role of the present in contemporary culture. Rosa diagnoses an increasing rift between the horizon of experience and the horizon of expectation, which makes everything but the present moment uncertain, while a stable present itself becomes ever shorter (155). At the same time, the ever-increasing speed of social change goes together with a spreading conviction that nothing really ever changes, that rapid changes are only superfi cial while the underlying structure remains the same. This is what Paul Virilio calls L’inertie polaire , or ‘frenetic standstill’ in Rosa ’s version of the German translation of that title ( Rasender Stillstand ). In a contemporary time of constant crisis, we run ever faster on a slippery slope just to remain in the same place ( Rosa 134–5). Since the future has become unimaginable and thus unavailable as a space of agency, we live in what Nowotny calls an ‘extended present ’, in which increasingly we merely react to current events and crises, without attempting to shape our

108 CONCLUSION

future ( passim , especially 45–74) . Only the present moment counts, and new communication technology allows us to celebrate and broadcast this present moment in every instant, no matter where we are. Status updates and Facebook time-lines give us the possibility to constantly mark and validate our present, to deliver a current report on our actions and where-abouts. Rushkoff therefore diagnoses a ‘present shock’ in Western cul-tures, leading to an increasing rift between past , present and future , to a collapse of narratives and to neurotic and cultural problems.

It is possible that such a widely diagnosed focus on the present contrib-utes to the popularity of present-tense narration in contemporary fi ction. The use of the present tense might seem to increase the relevance of the story that is told. Even historical events are thus transposed into the pres-ent moment, because nowadays only the present counts. However, I have my doubts about such a diagnosis. History and even historical distance (provided by the reader) play an important role in many of the novels which I have discussed. At the same time, the predominant use of the pres-ent tense is precisely not that of a current report , reminiscent in any way of constant status updates in the new media . Quite the contrary, the empha-sis is predominantly on narrative connections and a narrative shaping of stories. The ‘present shock’ may threaten the coherence of narratives—because we lack the time and perspective to situate events in a larger narra-tive arch—but present-tense narration in its contemporary form decidedly does not. Moreover, I have already mentioned the conspicuous absence of recent communication technology and new media from the content of the novels which I have discussed. Nor does the rush and speed of contempo-rary Western societies feature as a central topic. In fact, the old medium of the novel seems to remain quite conservative in its resistance to recent technological and social changes.

Another explanation for the increase in present-tense narration might be found in developments within literature. Modernist and postmodernist experimentation opened the way for a wider distribution of present-tense narration. Today, as I have argued, the originally defamiliarising effect of the present tense has been lost, but it has gained a whole variety of other possibilities of signifi cation. With repeated usage, it has become a liter-ary option almost on par with the more traditional past-tense narration . Moreover, as I have already suggested above, some aspects of present- tense narration may seem favourable to a literature that tries to position itself in the aftermath of postmodernism. In face of postmodernism’s cri-tique of reality and realism, present-tense narration emphasises its own

CONCLUSION 109

fi ctionality by exposing its narrative situation as impossible. Thus, the texts can make realist truth-claims without ever seeming to deny their fi ctional status. In this way they acknowledge postmodernist insights into the con-struction of reality, while at the same time continuing to make the kind of truth claims which postmodernism had condemned. Finally, it is possible that the increasing importance of creative writing programmes might have played a role in the increase in present-tense narration. The profession-alisation of authorship in such programmes encourages experimentation with style and also increases infl uences within and between generations of authors.

Whatever the reasons for its rise, of one thing I am reasonably certain: present-tense narration is not a passing fad, or a literary dead-end. It does not lead to an impoverishment of literary complexity or evince a restrictive focus on the present moment. Instead, it has proven immensely fl exible, capable of complex ambiguities and multiple meanings. Present-tense nar-ration allows stories to be told that past-tense narration cannot , or allows them to be told in a different way. To that extent, the emancipation of present-tense narration from the margin to a commonplace literary tech-nique heralds an enrichment of contemporary literature which can now draw on a wider range of stylistic possibilities to tell its stories.


APPENDIX

First-person narration Figural narration

Omniscient narration

Mixed

Narrative deictic

Aravind Adiga: White Tiger

Tan Twan Eng: The Garden of Evening Mists

Moshin Hamid: The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Ruth Ozeki: A Tale for the Time Being

Colm Tóibín: The Testament of Mary

Margaret Atwood: MaddAddam trilogy

Margaret Atwood: Blind Assassin

Nicola Barker: Clear

André P. Brink: Philida

Nadine Gordimer: Get a Life

Marlon James: A Brief History of Seven Killings

Richard Powers: Orfeo

Ali Smith: How to be both ; Hotel World

Retrospective John Burnside: Glister

Anne Enright: The Gathering

Barbara Gowdy: The Romantic

M. J. Hyland: Carry me down

J.M. Coetzee: Summertime

Damon Galgut: In a Strange Room

Rachel Seiffert: The Dark Room

Julian Barnes: Arthur & George

Tom McCarthy: C

Charlotte Mendelson: Almost English

(continued)

112 APPENDIX

First-person narration Figural narration

Omniscient narration

Mixed

Interior monologue

Emma Donoghue: The Room

David Mitchell: number9dream

Graham Swift: The Light of Day

Will Self: Umbrella

Ali Smith: The Accidental

Neel Mukherjee: The Lives of Others

Simultaneous Jim Crace: Harvest

David Mitchell: The Bone Clocks

Clare Morrall: Astonishing Splashes of Colour

DBC Pierre: Vernon God Little

Anna Smaill: The Chimes

A. L. Kennedy: The Blue Book

Hilary Mantel: Wolf Hall ; Bring Up the Bodies

Alison Moore: The Lighthouse

John Banville: The Infi nities

Nicola Barker: The Yips

David Mitchell: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet


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INDEX

A Adiga, Aravind

White Tiger , 24 Adiseshiah, Siân , 66 asynchronous present , 15, 53 atemporality , 7, 11, 21n2, 74 Atwood, Margaret

The Blind Assassin , 35, 37 MaddAddam , 33, 34 MaddAddam trilogy , 30–6, 106 Oryx and Crake , 30, 31, 33 The Year of the Flood , 31–3

authorial narration , 3, 5, 7, 8, 10, 19, 30, 48–52, 65–6, 70, 80–6, 88, 94–6

autobiography , 5, 6, 27, 45, 71 Avanessian, Armen , 2, 7, 9, 13–15,

17, 20, 21n5, 27, 52–4, 100, 103

B Banville, John

The Infi nities , 82–6, 88, 94 Barker, Nicola

Clear , 88, 100, 103

The Yips , 81, 83, 86 Barnes, Julian

Arthur & George , 51–3 Barthes, Roland , 47 Barth, John

‘Autobiography: A Self-Recorded Fiction,’ 12

Bildungsroman , 57 Brink, André

Philida , 94–7, 100, 103 Bulawayo, NoViolet

We Need New Names , 103 Burnside, John

Glister , 43–5, 54, 88, 104

C Calvino, Italo

If on a winter’s night a traveller , 12

camera-perspective , 12, 60, 61, 76, 77, 81, 86

Casparis, Christian Paul , 8, 9, 12, 16, 21n2, 39, 43, 44, 76, 102, 105

Note: Page numbers with “n” denote notes.

120 INDEX

Coetzee, J.M. , 13, 45, 70, 85 Summertime , 45, 53 Waiting for the Barbarians ,

13, 85 Cohn, Dorrit , 10, 15, 17, 42, 71 conversational mode , 24, 25, 39, 78,

86, 89, 102, 106 Crace, Jim

Harvest , 71–5, 86, 102, 105 current report , 11–13, 24, 61, 70, 72,

82, 84, 85, 107, 108 Currie, Mark , 33

D defamiliarisation , 2, 11, 17, 108 Defoe, Daniel , 5 deviation from the norm , 10, 17, 40 dialogue , 33, 36, 52, 77, 81, 82 Dickens, Charles , 9

Bleak House , 21n3 David Copperfi eld , 9, 11

direct reader address , 7, 10, 12, 14, 26, 27, 79, 83, 85, 89, 94

discourse , 8–10, 12, 14, 17, 24, 27, 29, 32, 36, 63, 67, 75, 79, 80, 85

Donoghue, Emma Room , 58–60, 67, 103, 104

drama , 13, 35, 58, 82–4, 86 dramatic monologue , 97 dreams , 9–11, 27, 48, 56, 57, 64

E Eliot, George , 7 Eng, Tan Twan

The Garden of Evening Mists , 28, 29, 36

Enright, Anne The Gathering , 41–4

Eshelman, Raoul , 104 eternity , 84, 91, 93

experiencing I , 8, 9, 40, 43, 46, 58, 71

experimentation , 17, 49, 56, 60, 108, 109

F fabula . See plot facticity , 13, 19, 53, 102, 107 factography , 11, 12 factuality , 14, 29, 35, 53 fi ctionality , 14, 15, 27, 35, 42, 44,

52–4, 83, 102, 103, 107, 109 Fielding, Henry , 5, 6

Shamela , 6 fi gural narration , 3, 7, 19, 26, 27,

29–35, 45–8, 60–5, 70, 75–80, 85, 86, 88, 90, 92, 98

fi rst-person narration , 3, 5–8, 15, 18, 19, 24–33, 35, 40–6, 53, 56–60, 70–5, 78, 83, 85, 86, 88, 89, 94, 96, 99, 100, 102, 103, 106

Fleischman, Suzanne , 7, 10, 12, 13, 21n2, 74, 84, 86

Fludernik, Monika , 2, 7–10, 13, 15, 17, 23, 39, 70, 76

future, the , 2, 3, 7, 11, 14, 17, 19, 25, 28–31, 33–7, 41, 43, 45, 60, 64, 74–6, 79, 83–5, 93, 99, 105–8

G Galgut, Damon

In a Strange Room , 45–6 Gass, William H. , 1 Genette, Gérard , 5, 11, 14, 20, 71,

77, 84 ghost , 77, 94, 99, 102 Gordimer, Nadine

Get a Life , 89–92, 100 Gowdy, Barbara

The Romantic , 41, 53

INDEX 121

H Hamburger, Käte , 14 Hamid, Mohsin

The Reluctant Fundamentalist , 24 Hennig, Anke , 2, 7, 9, 13–15, 17, 20,

21n5, 27, 52–4, 100, 103 Hildyard, Rupert , 66 historical novel , 2, 16, 20, 28, 29, 46,

49, 51, 53, 71, 76, 79, 81, 93, 95, 97, 100, 105, 107

historical present , 8–10, 13, 15, 18, 39, 40, 42, 51, 71, 90, 97

history , 7, 15, 21n1, 29, 34, 36, 41, 45, 47, 48, 50, 52–4, 56, 65, 70, 72, 78, 79, 92, 94, 96, 97, 105, 106, 108

Hyland, M.J. Carry Me Down , 40, 54

I the imaginary , 9, 10 imagination , 34, 42, 53, 54, 57, 64,

97, 105 interior monologue , 18, 49, 69–71,

84, 85, 88, 90, 91, 94, 107 irony , 58

J James, Marlon

A Brief History of Seven Killings , 93, 97, 100, 103, 106

Jauss, David , 1 Joyce, James

Ulysses , 11 judgement , 49, 66, 67, 72, 73, 75, 76,

85, 97, 104, 105

K Kennedy, A. L.

The Blue Book , 79, 85, 86

Kermode, Frank , 73 Kingsnorth, Paul

The Wake , 103 Kirby, Alan , 104

M Man Booker Prize , 1–3, 56 Mantel, Hilary

Bring up the Bodies , 2, 76–9, 85, 86

Wolf Hall , 2, 76–9, 85, 86 McCarthy, Tom

C , 48–51, 53, 88, 106 memory , 9, 11, 24, 25, 29, 31–4,

40–3, 45, 46, 53, 56, 59, 62, 63, 65, 75, 92, 97–9, 104

Mendelson, Charlotte Almost English , 51

metafi ction , 8, 12, 19 metalepsis , 36, 96 mimetic paradigm , 6, 7, 14–18,

20, 21n5, 24–9, 55, 59, 63, 70, 71, 80, 85, 86, 89, 94, 96, 100, 102

mimetic paradign , 103 Mitchell, David

The Bone Clocks , 75, 88, 106 number9dream , 56–60, 67, 103,

107 The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de

Zoet , 81, 88 Miyahara, Kazunari , 16, 105 modernism , 10–13, 16, 18,

21n5, 49, 56, 62, 64, 66, 107, 108

Moore, Alison The Lighthouse , 76, 85

Morrall Clare Astonishing Splashes of

Colour , 75 Mukherjee, Neel

The Lives of Others , 65, 67

122 INDEX

N narrating I , 8, 9, 40, 43, 46,

58, 71 narrativity , 56, 59, 63, 66, 84, 103,

106, 107 new media , 106, 108 non-sequitur novel , 16, 40, 43, 44,

49, 76, 102, 105 nouveau roman , 11, 12 Nowotny, Helga , 107

O objectivity , 11–13, 19 omniscience , 7, 19, 43, 44, 65, 80–4,

86, 88, 90, 94, 95 open ending , 27, 30, 33, 35, 36, 58,

76, 106 oral narration , 10, 39, 73, 94, 95, 97,

100, 103 Ozeki, Ruth

A Tale for the Time Being , 26–9, 36, 107

P past-tense narration , 2, 6–8, 10–12,

14, 15, 17, 18, 23, 25–30, 32–5, 39–43, 45, 50, 51, 53, 65, 71, 74, 75, 80, 90–2, 94–9, 102, 103, 108, 109

past, the , 2, 7, 9–11, 13–15, 17, 18, 25, 28–34, 41–4, 46, 47, 50, 53, 54, 59, 60, 74, 75, 77, 84, 91–3, 96–9, 104, 105, 108

Phelan, James , 84–6 photography , 47, 48, 53, 76 Pierre, DBC

Vernon God Little , 75, 102 plot , 11–14, 18, 27, 29, 30, 32, 35,

63, 107 poetry , 13, 60, 61, 84, 92

postmodernism , 10, 12, 13, 16, 20, 29, 104, 105, 108, 109

Powers, Richard Orfeo , 92–3, 107

presentifi cation , 10, 14, 47, 48, 53, 85

present tense consistent use of , 10, 11, 13, 16,

44, 49, 53, 73, 79 deictic , 7, 8, 10, 13, 19, 23–5, 30,

32, 35, 36, 93, 94 descriptive , 12, 24, 25, 60, 77, 82,

91, 92, 98 immediacy of , 11, 27, 41, 43, 45,

58, 60, 66, 74, 76, 98, 101, 105

intermittent , 7–10, 15, 40 iterative , 17, 25, 42, 43, 73, 91 narrative deictic , 18, 55, 59, 69, 88,

92, 99 non-fi ctional aspects of , 12, 13,

16, 19 non-narrative aspects of , 8–10, 12,

13, 16, 18, 19, 24, 36, 56, 66, 70, 82, 98

performative , 24, 32, 35, 77 retrospective , 11, 18, 34, 40, 55,

69, 71, 72, 79, 80, 87–90, 92–6, 98, 104

simultaneous , 6, 15, 18, 19, 21n5, 26, 29, 32, 40–3, 48, 54, 56, 59, 86, 88, 89, 93–6, 98–9, 102, 106

present, the , 2, 3, 11–14, 17, 19, 21n2, 25–8, 30–5, 41–4, 46–8, 50, 53, 54, 57, 60, 62, 65, 75, 76, 83, 84, 91–3, 96, 98, 99, 103, 107–9

Pullman, Philipp , 1 Pynchon, Thomas

Gravity’s Rainbow , 13

INDEX 123

R realism , 6, 27, 29, 49, 63, 80, 81, 83,

95, 109 refl ector , 24, 30, 47, 48, 61, 63, 70,

76, 77, 79, 86, 88, 92, 103 rhetorical effect , 9, 10, 42, 45, 51, 53,

54, 86, 90 Richardson, Samuel , 5, 6

Clarissa , 6 The History of Sir Charles

Grandison , 6 Pamela , 6

Rosa, Hartmut , 107 Rushkoff, Douglas , 107, 108

S second-person narration , 12, 79,

86, 93 Seiffert, Rachel

The Dark Room , 48, 53, 87 self-refl exivity , 29, 41 Self, Will

Umbrella , 62–5, 67 Smaill, Anna

The Chimes , 75, 103 Smith, Ali

The Accidental , 60–3, 66, 67, 97, 98, 103

Hotel World , 97, 98, 100 How to Be Both , 97, 98, 100

Stanzel, Franz , 19, 20, 88 Sterne, Laurence

Tristram Shandy , 6–8 stream of consciousness , 11, 18, 49,

62, 63, 65, 66, 72, 94, 107 subjectivity , 11, 13, 105, 107 sujet . See discourse Swift, Graham

The Light of Day , 59, 60

T tense shifts , 10, 14, 18, 32, 33, 39–41,

46, 51, 52, 61, 75, 90–2, 103 Thackeray, William Makepeace

Vanity Fair , 8 third-person narration , 3, 7, 8, 15, 19,

44, 46 Tóibín, Colm

The Testament of Mary , 25, 36 trauma , 42, 43, 49 Trollope, Anthony

The Warden , 80

U unnatural narration , 7, 16 unreliability , 25, 29, 41, 42, 44, 53,

54, 57 Updike, John

Rabbit, Run , 13

V Virilio, Paul , 107 visuality , 10, 12, 17, 42, 43, 76, 77,

80, 81, 83, 86, 92, 104, 106 vividness , 10, 21n2, 41–3, 46, 53, 90,

98, 104, 105

W Watt, Ian , 5, 6 Weinrich, Harald , 8, 17 Woolf, Virginia

The Waves , 11, 12

Y youth , 40, 41, 44, 52, 57–60, 66, 67,

75, 89, 91, 94, 98, 103–5

Documents

PRESENT-TENSE NARRATION IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION · I. Huber, Present-tense Narration in Contemporary Fiction, DOI10.1057/978-1-137-56213-5_1 CHAPTER 1 Introduction Abstract A brief